Is it safe to update to the nightly releases? Can you do it automatically?
I just upgraded to the latest release candidate (from a 1+ year old version) and it re-locked my phone and disabled the Google Play store. I finally figured out after much googling that I had to reflash google apps but was pretty stressed for a while there.
I'm wondering if perhaps I auto-update to nightlies if I wouldn't run into that problem again, but then I'm also worried about a bad release.
This is probably because you came from 10.1 and upgraded to 10.2.
Then it locks your phone again, but its easy to re-enable. Updates between 10.2 versions don't lock your phone.
You can just download new updates in your configuration, system submenu of your phone.
Just download and then click install. I never had a problem with it actually (although they are nightlies), sometimes battery improvements are noticable and system improvements, that's really cool.
So, i never experienced a bad release, and i'm always capable of downgrading my phone to the previous release (i download a new upgrade, install the new release and after some days i delete the old installation files).
A lot of days, i just do an update every day at midnight when i'm going to sleep.
One day, my phone went from 1 day battery time to 2 days (after the update from 10.1 to 10.2, somewhere the fifth nightly update i did).
One advice, if you install 10.3 in the future, install GAPPS in your system/app directory first. So you can install it immediatly.
It's complexities like this that I am too old to have time for that would make me more than happy to pay $x/year for a premium Cyanogenmod "subscription" service as floated recently that takes care of all this for you.
I hope I see the battery life improvements, that's one of my main complaints about Android.
I've been running nightlies for maybe 8 months to a year now. I update every few days to a week. I've had two issues in that time:
1. When the alarm clock app was rewritten/significantly changed it began crashing in startup. Cleared the app data for it and it worked fine.
2. More recently, when they merged in the 4.3 branch from AOSP, it required an update to gapps as well. I didn't actually read the change/upgrade logs and ended up just reinstalling my phone clean.
Really not all that many problems when you consider it, and not all that serious. The worst case scenario (reinstall phone, restore from backups) only came up once.
I just upgraded to the latest release candidate (from a 1+ year old version) and it re-locked my phone and disabled the Google Play store. I finally figured out after much googling that I had to reflash google apps but was pretty stressed for a while there.
I'm wondering if perhaps I auto-update to nightlies if I wouldn't run into that problem again, but then I'm also worried about a bad release.