After unlocking the bootloader, installing a custom recovery is the next step to take full advantage of your Huawei Nexus 6P. Android is a very complex mobile system and the reason why it is so popular is because it can be modified and adopted to individual’s preferences.
A custom recovery allows you to install various files on your Nexus 6P. If you want to install a custom ROM or kernel, you need to have a custom recovery. The phone does come with a stock recovery by default but it doesn’t have the ability to flash custom ZIP files. That is why you need a custom recovery.
There are many advantages of installing a custom recovery on your Nexus 6P. Besides the fact of flashing files, you can also perform Nandroid backups, which is the best way of backing up every data on the phone.
How to install custom recovery on Nexus 6P
At the moment of writing, there aren’t many custom recoveries available for the Nexus 6P. However, the guide works for every recovery which comes in the form of img. file. Popular recoveries like TWRP come as img files.
- Download and install ADB drivers.
- Download and install USB drivers.
- Unlock Nexus 6P bootloader
- Go to Settings > Developer Options and enable USB Debugging.
- Download the IMG file of your preferred recovery. It can be TWRP or whatever you prefer.
- Turn the phone off. Press the power and volume down buttons to boot into fastboot mode.
- Connect your phone to your computer.
- Rename the recovery file to ‘customrecovery.img’ and move it to the ADB folder.
- Inside the ADB folder, press Shift and right mouse click. Select Open Command Window here.
- There, insert the following code:
fastboot flash recovery customrecovery.img
- This will flash the recovery on your phone.
Now you can go back to fastboot mode and choose the newly installed recovery.