How to Manually Update Google Glass

If you’ve rooted your Google Glass or something happened during the OTA update, then you might need to manually update it. This isn’t a very complicated process, but you need to be very careful when doing it, because it can brick your device.

In order to update it manually, you will need the Android SDK, OTA update files and you also have to enable USB debugging on your Google Glass.

The Android SDK can be downloaded directly from Google’s website located here. After you download it, make sure to run SDK Manager and update it.

Now you will have to download the OTA update files. You should find them all on our page here, but if any of them is missing, please let us know and we will update the page. After you download the file, extract it and make sure to remember the extracted location.

In order to enable USB Debugging you will have to go to Settings > Device Info and tap the card in order to enable it. You can read a more comprehensive guide, along with screenshots in our article here.

Now you will have to enter fastboot mode on your Google Glass. This is pretty simple and you can read about it in the article previously linked.

After doing all of this you are ready to manually update your Google Glass. Open command prompt, navigate to the location where you have extracted the Android SDK > sdk > platform tools. Here you can run the adb and fastboot commands.

Now run the following commands in the same order. Make sure you don’t do anything else, because you could brick your Glass.

$ adb reboot bootloader
$ fastboot devices
$ fastboot flash boot boot.img
$ fastboot flash system system.img
$ fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
$ fastboot erase cache
$ fastboot erase userdata

If you want to understand what the lines above do, then here you have them explained:
adb reboot bootloader boots Glass in fastboot mode. fastboot devices checks if Glass is connected to the computer and USB debugging is enabled. If it is, you will see Glass’ serial number.

The flash commands flash the specified files on your Glass, which is the actual update. The erase commands will factory reset Glass to make sure everything will work well.

If you encounter any problem, make sure to leave us a comment below or join our forum, where we have a lot of Google Glass experts ready to help you.