HTC Android Updates Guaranteed For Two Years

HTC took to Reddit last week and announced in an AMA a new pledge to provide Android updates for all flagship devices for two years after their release date. The announcement follows the company’s apology in January for failing to push Android 4.4 updates to HTC One users within 90 days of Google’s KitKat rollout – a timetable HTC had imposed on itself.

As noted by Android Police, the company initially promised two years of updates for everyone before revising their statement to specifically reference devices only in North America.

“Last month we published an infographic and software updates page on HTC.com that details how we update the software on our phones and timelines for our next releases. This infographic makes the complicated Android update process from Google’s source code release to OTA on your phone look closer to Chutes and Ladders and less like plans to build the Death Star. We have a long history of firsts (first Android phone, first LTE phone, first 1080p display), but the Android ecosystem has made it notoriously difficult to provide timely updates,” HTC’s USA product team said.

“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 North America flagship devices going forward with all major Android updates for 2 years after their release date.”

While it certainly doesn’t hurt for HTC to provide two years of support for its flagship smartphones, it’s not likely the move will have a big impact on the company’s bottom line, which has been hurting in recent months.