Google surprised us all with an earlier than expected release of the first Android 11 Developer Preview late last night. However, the preview image is meant only for Pixel smartphones, excluding the original Pixel and Pixel XL. So, if you can’t wait to try out all the new features Google is working on, here is how to install Android 11 on your phone.

The Android 11 DP1 supports the following smartphones:

How to Install Android 11 on Your Phone Right Away

There are two ways you can go about installing Android 11 on your compatible Pixel smartphone. You can use the first method if you haven’t unlocked the bootloader on your phone, and if you have a Pixel with an unlocked bootloader, you should use the second method.

Install Android 11 using ADB and Sideload

If your supported Pixel smartphone doesn’t have an unlocked bootloader, you can easily sideload the update file on your phone to update it to Android 11 DP1. Here’s how:

adb reboot recovery

adb sideload .zip

The update will be installed on your phone. Once the process has completed (it took around 10 minutes to install on our Pixel 2 XL), just select ‘Reboot system now’ on your phone and it will boot up with Android 11 Developer Preview 1 running on it.

If your phone has an unlocked bootloader, like our Pixel 4 unit, you will have to flash a factory image on your phone to update it to Android 11. Here’s how you can do that.

  • Download the factory image for your phone from this link and extract the ZIP file to the location where ADB and Fastboot files are located on your computer.
  • Connect your phone to your computer using a USB cable ensuring that USB Debugging is enabled.
  • Launch the command prompt and type the following command
  • adb reboot bootloader
  • This will reboot your phone into its bootloader. Now, just double-click on the ‘flash-all.bat’ file on your Windows computer to run it. On Mac, you will have to run the “flash-all.sh” command inside Terminal.

The process will take some time, but once it has completed, your phone will boot into Android 11.

adb reboot bootloader

Once again, let me warn you that these are developer previews, and can cause your phone to crash, or brick, and can cause data loss as well. If that’s a risk you’re prepared to take, you can follow the steps mentioned above and install Android 11 Developer Preview 1 on your smartphone.