HTC originally announced that the Desire HD would be receiving Ice Cream Sandwich, but has recently retracted its statement citing user experience issues.  Today, HTC has released an official explanation on their decision to not upgrade the Desire HD. HTC talks about how after installing the update, they felt that the user experience was poor. There are also partition issues that they would have to work around, with HTC mentioning that user data could be overwritten. That isn’t a big deal for us hardcore modders, but for everyday consumers who need their data, this is a big deal.
HTC deciding not to update the Desire HD isn’t really a surprise, as the device was released mid-2010 and has outdated specs compared to today’s top notch Android devices. At least the Desire HD still has the developer community on its back, right? Full statement down below:
We’ve heard your feedback on our decision not to update the HTC Desire HD to Android 4.0. We completely understand that this is a controversial decision.
For more background, due to how storage on the HTC Desire HD is partitioned – and the larger size of Android 4.0 – it would require re-partitioning device storage and overwriting user data in order to install this update. While technically advanced users might find this solution acceptable, the majority of customers would not. We also considered ways to reduce the overall size of the software package, but this would impact features and functionality that customers are currently using. Even after installing the update, there were other technical limitations which we felt negatively impacted the user experience.
We believe an update should always improve the user experience and carefully evaluate each update based on this criteria. While we are very aware of the disappointment from this decision, we believe the impact to user experience was too great. We recognize this is a change from our previous statement and for that we’re truly sorry.
Source: HTC Blog
