HTC says ‘sorry’ to Desire HD owners, explains why ICS update isn’t happening

Desire HD owners have had a torrid time lately. It’s one thing to not update a phone to the latest OS, but it’s another to subject users to a ‘will they, won’t they’ narrative. Now, HTC has released a statement telling customers that it’s “truly sorry” about its flip-flopping. In the same statement, it also gives an explanation as to why it won’t be able to update the Desire HD past Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Apparently, the issue is primarily down to how HTC partitioned the phone’s internal storage, but the company also cites other “technical limitations” which “negatively impacted the user experience.” The full statement follows 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.”