State of the HTC One M8 update, AT&T late, rumors and conjecture
I’ll lead with this contains no solid information, no directly sourced info from HTC, and I may be doing what several blogs were doing back at the end of December and putting out an “update is nearly here for all” piece without a leg to stand on. That said, however, here’s my baseless rumor-mongering article that I feel mostly confident about.
With Android Lollipop rolling out to a few HTC One M8 devices (namely the Development and Unlocked versions,) the question always is, “When will I get it?” I’ll point out here I’m going on several tweets, IRC chats, and forum posts from people who generally don’t have much of a reason to mislead, so this is all potentially wrong, but this weekend is looking good. Possibly.
Unfortunately, what it’s looking good for isn’t quite clear. Whether this is an HTC finished release to carriers or a release to end users, that I don’t know. Probably safe to assume it’s HTC washing its hands of the deployment and the root world will probably have several leaks of the Sense/Lollipop updates as opposed to the couple that are out there now (which if I’m not mistaken are not leaks so much as ports from the Developer Edition).
Side note – AT&T release from this week you may have heard about took them up to Android 4.4.4 so I think it’s safe to say if you’re on AT&T you’re probably not going to see Lollipop for a little while longer. That’s all on AT&T. Welcome to the Android version all the rest of us are tired of. Edit: AT&T evidently yanked the 4.4.4 update
The official status on all non-GPE/Development/Unlocked versions on all carriers is currently phase 2 of 4. This is the integration phase in which the carrier-specific features are grafted in. Considering we’re seeing plenty of GSM and Verizon Lollipop/Sense ROMs floating about I think it’s probably fair to conjecture that what’s happening next is an end to integration and the beginning of certification.
As we’ve seen in the past updates, the testing/certification phase doesn’t consist of too much testing. They seem to have been of the mindset in the past to push it and deal with the consequences. One such notable incident included breaking core GPS services on the HTC EVO 4G LTE for nearly a year before fixing. Considering we’re looking at a 5.0.1 or 5.0.2 which already has a list of problems associated with it to be ironed out in 5.0.3 they may just push and aim to get and found bugs fixed the next update.
That said, as the Development version has had a couple of weeks running, the Google Play Editions have had over a month of Lollipop, it’s probably go time. I’d point out at this point this is mostly speculation, so don’t make plans to sit at home pressing check for updates.
Also considering HTC’s track record the past few months with its service packs, if you need a phone to make phone calls you might want to wait until some other people have done the upgrade before upgrading.
If you’ve heard anything conclusive one way or the other, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop a line.
You can see the official status of your phone on the HTC Software Updates page.
