When we look back on it, 2014 may be remembered as the Summer of Android Wear. With two new flagship smartwatches due out soon, Google's been readying its mobile OS for the wearables sector.
Just recently, a test build of the firmware from the upcoming LG G Watch leaked. This gave us our first look at a more polished version of Android Wear, and it also included a rather interesting boot animation.
With a very "Googley" set of colors, the G Watch's boot animation blends together to form the Android trademark—but it's not the one we're all familiar with. Thanks to a port of this boot animation made by Daniel Koman, we can all sneak a peek at what looks to be a rebranding of the Android trademark. Here's how to install the animation on your rooted Nexus 5.
This guide can also work for other non-Nexus 5 rooted devices, but the scaling may vary, so keep that in mind—this is why backing up your original file is necessary in Step 2.
Download the Bootanimation ZIP File
From your Nexus 5's web browser, tap this link to start the download. Wait until it's finished before proceeding to the next step.
Copy the File to Your System Partition
For this step, you'll need a root-enabled file browser. Any such app will do the trick, but I'm demonstrating on Root Explorer here.
Navigate to your Download folder and long-press the bootanimation.zip file. From the menu that pops up, select Copy.
Next, head to the root directory of your phone and browse to the /system/media folder. In here, you'll find your existing boot animation, but don't paste the new one in just yet.
Note that for Samsung devices, you'll need to navigate to /data/local rather than /system/media.
Long-press the old bootanimation.zip file and select Rename from the following menu. From here, append a .bak suffix to the filename and press OK.
Next, hit Copy Here or Paste, depending on what file browser you're using.
Reboot to See the Boot Animation
At this point, your new boot animation is already in effect. Just reboot your phone to see the changes and the (possibly) new Android logo.
The boot animation itself is pretty slick—a set of Google-colored dots spawn from a sun icon, then fly about, eventually merging into eachother and forming the Android trademark. If this is indeed the new Android typeface, your Nexus is now well ahead of its time.
Troubleshooting
If you experience any problems with this boot animation, it might be due to a problem with the permissions of the file (thanks Daniel).
Use your root-enabled file browser to head to /system/media again and long-press the new bootanimation.zip file. Select Permissions from the dialog menu.
Next, make sure the Read and Write options under Owner are ticked, and nothing else. For Group and Others, leave only the Read permission ticked.
Once you've got that all sorted, just press OK and reboot to give it another shot.
So what do you think? This has to be the new face of Android, right? Do you like the new look? Tell us about it in the comments section below.
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