When it excluded the Desire HD from the Android 4.0 upgrade list, HTC ruffled feathers and dampened spirits. The company claims to have a good reason for denying the update that it’s been doling out elsewhere, however.
The company says there’s no way to push a new version into the device like there was for the Desire’s leap to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Fitting all that Ice Cream Sandwich into the Desire HD would require repartitioning the internal space, and repartitioning risks overwriting personal content; basically, it could cause all those irreplaceable family photos, or other personal content, to be wiped away.
HTC also cites “other technical limitations” that might also “negatively impact the user experience.” The full statement from HTC follows.
“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.”