HTC appear to be ramping up their efforts to keep their flagship devices up to date, and having told the world that the HTC One would receive an update to Android 4.4 KitKat within 90 days, it looks as if things have moved to the next stage.
Well, almost. In a tweet concerning the HTC One Google Play Edition, HTC has announced that the KitKat update has been delivered to Google, and will no doubt soon be pushed out as an update over the air.
Good news, we've delivered KitKat code to Google for HTC One GPE. Timing of push via PlayStore to be determined by Google.
— HTC USA (@HTCUSA) November 15, 2013
This doesn’t mean much for HTC One (non-GPE users), but it does suggest that the update might not be too far away, and the initial 90 day timeframe might be quite realistic. One has to expect that updating the GPE handsets hasn’t been a difficult task (given they’re 99% AOSP code without modification), and equally, updating Sense 5 to work on KitKat might take a bit more effort.
KitKat by February 2014? Looks pretty likely I’d say.
*HTC One Google Phone Edition to receive Android 4.4 update within WEEKS
Do Australian HTC One devices have Australian-specific radio firmware? If so, it’ll be a long wait yet.
And yet my nexus 4 and 7 are still waiting for the official over the air update thanks google
Mine is too 😛 Remember they are released in batches, so servers aren’t flooded and so that the updates can easily be pulled if there are problems (as only 5% or whatever people have access to it)
I flashed factory 4.4 images on my N7 2012 and there is not much of a change tbh
I really don’t buy this excuse of straining their servers. If Apple, who are not great at web services, can simultaneously release an OS update to far more devices than Google has to in this instance, then why can’t (arguably) the best internet services company do the same? Do they really have such a lack of confidence in the quality of the release?
Call me a fanboy, but I find it really hard to listen to criticism of Google. That said, I 100% agree with what you’re saying. Why don’t I have the update for my N4 & N7 (2013) yet??
I reckon that’s a pretty good sign of being a fan boy :-p. We should constructively criticise Google like any other company. It doesn’t mean they suck or are a bad company, just that they can do things better which we all want. Google does various things better than Apple. In this case Apple does it better than Google.
Didn’t the apple servers go down on the 7.0 update? 🙂
Not that I recall. Some people have to try the download a few times if they’re trying in the first 24 hours, but it works. 200 million iOS devices updated successfully in the first 5 days. How many Nexus devices would be out there? No one really knows, but certainly no where near this number.
I agree. These ‘Google Play Edition’ phones should be behind the Nexus line in terms of updates, not ahead. If the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy Google Play Editions get the 4.4 update first, a lot of people are going to be VERY annoyed, myself included… I want me some Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 Android 4.4 goodness!
btw Google Edition is not 99% AOSP, it jjust looks and acts that way. Originally, on HTC One the first google edition firmware was very similar to sense, almost a de sensed build if you like. Kernels for 4.2.2 sense and GE are interchangeable. However 4.3 Google Edition on One was a deviation from Sense, but still has sense stuff in there HTC like to put their “optimizations” like pnpmgr (power and performance manager) and perflock (performance lock) which are HTC changes and require HTC hooks and framework. I reckon seeing that they’ve made progress with their proprietary changes on… Read more »
idk what idiots downvoted you, you’re correct.
Yep! GPE ROMs have a lot more HTC in them than they’d appear. They contain the code for the IR blaster and some of the framework modifications necessary to get the Sense camera app working as well.
HTC are generally pretty quick at getting updates out; they’re just awful at supporting devices for longer than 6 months.
HTC One has had great support in terms of software (I had a hardware fault and I’m less than impressed)
It’s been almost a year and we’re still the first to get updates, quality updates at that. Sense has been clearly developed with purpose on jellybean, most things make sense (even more on 5.5)
Just wondering what will happen when the next flagship takes over lol 🙂
But it seemed 4.4 GPE was rushed or something because there’s less and less HTC in the Google edition software