Owners of HTC‘s flagship One smartphone will soon be in for a much awaited sweet treat. The company has revealed that the Android 4.4 KitKat update for the device has finally entered the carrier’s testing and certification process along its journey to end users.
HTC has put up a web page that details the status of various Android updates for some of its more popular smartphones, with a particular emphasis on Android 4.4 for its HTC One family of devices. Progress is split into various stages, such as Evaluation, Development, Integration, Certification, and final Push to customers, in that order. Here we can see that Android 4.4 for the carrier-branded HTC One is already at the Certification stage, which HTC expects to be finished next week.
The company has been surprisingly very candid about its process in pushing out Android updates. Last December, it released an infographic that detailed what it goes through to deliver updates to users. To some extent, it’s easy for HTC to divulge that process since it somewhat subtly shifts the blame of bottlenecks and delays to carriers.
HTC’s Android update page also reveals other interesting information. The HTC One mini from AT&T and HTC One max are also in the process of getting an Android 4.4 update but are still in the integration stage. The Droid DNA a.k.a. HTC Butterfly as well as the Desire 601 announced last September are also in queue.