Refreshing the Nexus 7

Google’s Nexus 7 table caused quite a stir when it was released in 2012 with its low price combined with the excellent specifications it offered. It proved very popular and rightly so. Fast forward to 2015 and the Nexus 7 is very much, sadly, showing its age. Google have proved good to their word and have provided Android updates to the Nexus 7 which has provided the latest features of Android to the Nexus 7’s owners but the device just does not have the hardware to run the latest Android versions with the performance owners came to expect. Android 5 upwards runs painfully slow on my device, and each update has done little to remedy this fact. My Nexus 7 had become almost unusable.

There are a few ways to improve the performance including a factory reset, tweaking some performance settings but none of these provided much improvement. The factory reset worked the best but only for a short time and even then it never matched the performance of the original out of the box experience.

Eventually I rooted the device and installed CyanogenMod and have not looked back since. The experience is like the Nexus 7 was originally and the device is now used daily. It is slick and smooth, albeit on an old version of Android. Security updates aside I don’t mind being behind the curve on Android if it means I get a useable tablet. It’s been three months since I moved to CyanogenMod and its been rock solid all that time.

![DSC00186_Ts] Step by step instructions on rooting the device and installing CyanogenMod can be found at the link below on the CyanogenMod wiki. The Nexus 7 2012 version being called ‘Grouper’. Don’t forget to also download Google Apps for Grouper so as to have access to the Google Play App Store to be able to download all your apps (this is covered as an optional step in the last section of the wiki article). How to Install CyanogenMod on the Google Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi, 2012 version)

I installed the version CyanogenMod 10 (Android 4.3 Jelly Bean) on mine which is not too far from the original Google build. There are many versions of CyanogenMod  for the Nexus 7 linked from the link above including version 11 & version 12. I went with version 10.2.1 on mine, from here. I may experiment with upgrading to CyanogenMod 12 at some point but for now I’m happy. I also repeated the process for my son’s Nexus 7’s and each time the process was simple and effective.