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Help I have a how to question regarding an old Nexus 7

Moondoggy

Moondoggy

Newbie
I have a Nexus 7 from back in 2012 that I was going to give to my 5 year old grandson to play with. I charged it last night and it booted just fine but I have a how to question. When new the Nexus had an old OS on it and I upgraded it several time and then I had to downgrade it to Android 4.4.4 because the next version up was unstable on this model. If I were to do a factory reset on this device would it downgrade to the older OS or stay at Android 4.4.4? If it would downgrade to the earlier OS is there a way to remove my account from the device as currently it can't access the Google Play anymore as my account password has changed since it was last used and I don't want to put my account password back on the device since I'll be shipping it to another state. All my daughter is looking for is something that he can play some video games on and not use her cell phone. Any help and advice will be appreciated.
 
Moondoggy said:
...is there a way to remove my account from the device as currently it can't access the Google Play anymore as my account password has changed since it was last used and I don't want to put my account password back on the device since I'll be shipping it to another state. All my daughter is looking for is something that he can play some video games on and not use her cell phone. Any help and advice will be appreciated.
Click to expand...
yes just do a factory reset and your account will be erased. it will not downgrade the device...it will just remove the data off of the phone.
 
To remove your Google account from this phone you need to go into the Settings >> Accounts menu:
https://support.google.com/android/answer/7664951?hl=en

As mentioned in previous posts, a Factory Reset will not change your phone back to an earlier OS version, All it does is wipe the user data, it does nothing to the operating system. The internal storage of your Nexus 7 is divided into several partitions with most of them dedicated to the installed Android OS, and largest one is set up to be the user data partition. A Factory Reset only wipes that user data partition clean, it doesn't have any affect on any of the system partitions.

You referred to the phone being unstable after a system upgrade. Did you try wiping the system cache partition? That's a commonly recommended thing to try after something like a system upgrade (note that's becoming more of legacy thing as newer versions of Android devices no longer have separate system cache partitions).
Anyway, wiping the system cache isn't something done in the Settings menu, you need to reboot your Nexus into its Recovery Mode, instructions on the process here:
https://support.google.com/android/answer/7664951?hl=en
Remove your Google account in the Settings menu, then reboot it into Recovery Mode to do the wipe system cache partition and a Factory Reset. Then after restarting normally see if the phone is running normally again.
At some point you'll probably want to set up somebody's Google account in order to be able to access the Play Store.
 
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