HTC promises to update flagship devices for two years after release

HTC’s AMA on Reddit is going on right now, but there is one tidbit worth noting so far. Right upfront, the HTC product team is promising a two year commitment to all major Android updates. Sounds promising, but it has a few loopholes HTC can use to opt-out.

First, the two year commitment form HTTC is good on new flagship devices. If they continue not heir current trajectory, that means they’ll update one device for two years. Unless they consider variants of a flagship(like a Max or mini) to also be the flagship, it essentially means they have one device to update with major Android releases. From the Reddit post:

We don’t have a perfect track record regarding updates along with almost every phone manufacturer, but we’re dedicated to bring more transparency to the process and doing our best to deliver updates as quickly as we can. Given the immense resource requirements for updates we can’t solve all our past issues, but today we are making a commitment to support all new flagship devices going forward with all major Android updates for 2 years after their release date.

That gets us to the next hotword: major. What is considered “major”? A new name Google blesses it with, a significant amount of updates? They weren’t clear on that. They did apologize for past transgressions, in which they left devices to twist in the wind, but didn’t exactly clarify their efforts moving forward. They also didn’t note how quickly the updates would happen — another eyebrow raiser.

Between “major” Android updates and a flagship device, it’s clear HTC is really focussing their efforts and trying to give at least one fantastic experience. Though we’ll wait to see what subtleties remain with their new update process, it’s clear they understand the update process is important to us. We’ll trust HTC to do the right thing, since they’ve been really good about updates recently, but old wounds still show their wear.