HTC sells three different One variants in the US, and I’m not talking about operator models. There’s the regular One, which all operators slather with operator garbage and sell to you on a two year contract. There’s the Google One, which is sold unlocked, only works on GSM networks, and runs stock Android. But there’s a third more curious variant that doesn’t get a lot of press.
It’s called the HTC One Developer Edition, and it’s basically a 64 GB international variant of the One, except that the bootloader is unlocked. Why is that important? Because developers want to flash custom ROMs and do crazy things to their phones. Now the One Dev Edition is currently running Android 4.1, which is nuts considering 4.2 is already out there for international One owners, and 4.3 is running smoothly on the Google Edition One. This has HTC fans clearly upset, so HTC reached out on Twitter and said the Dev Edition will skip Android 4.2 and just go straight to 4.3. As my headline suggests, if you own a Dev Edition, didn’t you buy it because you wanted to hack and slash your own custom software? Drama, sometimes it’s not necessary.
