So what is the deadline for Lollipop on the HTC One M8?
It’s February 1 at 5:48PM CST, if you want to skip the rest of this.
So days keep marching on and you might be wondering what exactly the timeframe and wording of HTC’s 90-day guarantee for getting Android Lollipop on the M8 and M7 versions of the HTC One.
On Sunday, November 3, 2014, at 5:48PM HTC’s Canada Twitter feed publicly claimed to have received the code from Google. 90 days from that is Sunday February 1, or five days from when this publishes. An HTC/Google IO page claims so as well. So yay!
We have the Android Lollipop code. We’ll be updating the HTC One (M8) & (M7) within 90 days from today. #HTCAdvantage pic.twitter.com/es91jSRAwn
— HTC Canada (@HTCCanada) November 3, 2014
Except they didn’t promise within 90 days it would be on your phone. So boo.
HTC is excited about the new features in the Android L release and we can’t wait to share them with our customers. We are committed to updating our flagship HTC One family as fast as possible as part of our HTC Advantage program. We will begin rolling out updates to the HTC One (M8) and HTC One (M7) worldwide within 90 days of receiving final software from Google, followed shortly thereafter by other One family members and select devices.
What they promised was to roll out updates within 90 days. This is where it gets a bit tricky as for many variants of the One M8 at least they have rolled out updates. There have been Google Play Edition updates, Developer and Unlock versions updated, and even AT&T got an update, if just to Android 4.4.4 (and then I’m told it was yanked away).
There are plenty of carrier-specific test versions in the wild, although they had issues as of last week.
Once it’s out of HTC’s hands, assuming they make the deadline, it’s still up to the carriers to certify it and decide when to roll it out. They’re unlikely to release an update at the same time another huge update is coming out if not for the bandwidth issues, just for the not wanting to deal with a half million calls at once to customer support.
So unless something changes today, chances are that update isn’t going to be in your hands by their deadline, although they still can technically make it by giving the updates to the carriers.
I hope they make it to the end users. It would be nice if HTC’s promises and timelines meant something to the end users other than a reason to resent HTC. I really hope this isn’t a countdown to a letdown. I’d even let it slide to Monday since they got it fairly late in the day.
