The only place where you need to pay attention when doing a DIY upgrade is ensuring that you also update the radio firmware. If you go with the big incremental dumps that take you from one official release to another, then you get all of the firmware updates as part of the big package. If you just grab a random ROM image from the Internet, you don't necessarily get all that. The conservative thing is to first update your phone, with stock software, from whatever initial state you get all the way to the most recent 4.1.1. Once you're there, then you can start playing with third-party builds, if you want.


This is partly true, and partly bogus. If you're a naïve user who wants things to "just work", then updates happen over the air, automatically, without any care or thought on your part. They just magically work. However, different Android phones get updates at different times, and even the vaunted Galaxy Nexus has these odd variants, like the YUKJUXW tweak that Samsung sold, which goes to them rather than to Google for updates. That sort of fragmentation, on the same damn hardware, is simply inexcusable.

In the Apple universe, there's always a battle between the unlockers and Apple. They keep exploiting security vulnerabilities and Apple keeps patching them. It's amazing that the Apple unlockers have been as successful as they've been. In the Android universe, with an official Nexus phone, there's no exploitation. It's a supported feature, but it's meant for devs, not end users, thus all this 'adb' and 'fastboot' nonsense. As Mark noted, there's a tool that wraps all of this behind a nice GUI, if that's what you really want.

The only hard part is finding suitable documentation. Those chat forums are a disaster. That's why I wrote these things here, for my own benefit it not others, so you've got the minimum number of links that you need to get it done.