HTC had disappointed thousands of Desire HD users when it announced the device will not be receiving the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update. HTC has now explained on its blog why it has not rolled out the ICS update. One of the major issues the company has cited that the update could have risked users losing their personal data during the update.
Here’s what HTC said on its blog:
“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.”
HTC’s clarification kills off all speculation that company will succumb to the criticism and come up a customised version of the update. Evidently, it will never happen.
However, if you desparately want ICS on your Desire HD, you might have to take an unconventional route, which includes rooting your device. According to reports, the XDA community has already released an ICS ROM based on Cyanogenmod 9 for Desire HD. Moreover, you can also download a Jelly Bean ROM based the beta Cyanogenmod 10.