HTC expands on reasons behind cancelling Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for Desire HD

HTC has taken quite a bit of heat for going back and fourth about an ICS upgrade for the HTC Desire HD and it has taken the initiative to expand on the reasoning behind the cancellation of the upgrade and apologizes for the confusion that ensued as the story developed. Check out the official statement and our thoughts after the break.

27 July 2012: Further Explanation about HTC Desire HD Update

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.

What this all means is that a bad habit that HTC had started by giving their handsets relatively small OS partitions has eventually came back to bite them. This kind of partitioning strategy has been HTC's calling card for quite a while now and even the HTC One series has the same partitioning strategy to make UMS (USB Mass Storage) mode possible.

We do agree that while the needs of the few power users who absolutely wanted the upgrade does not outweigh the need of the many who want to preserve their precious data, but we think HTC can still come to a compromise. It had made headway with HTCDev and working with the community to foster strong HTC/Community relations but this is another bump the road to building confidence in power users.

We believe that what had been done with the original Desire should be the course of action with the Desire HD. Release a specific ROM built on ICS that also re-partitions the flash memory of the Desire HD and release it for community use only. This quells angry power users, while leave the mainstream users safe.

We hope that HTC decides to go this route in the near future.

Source: HTC Blog