Though the HTC One S is still a young phone at just over a year old, its update cycle has come to an end. HTC tells us that the One S will no longer be receiving updates, keeping it on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean and Sense 4+ at the latest. The phone’s 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM should have made it powerful enough to handle any Android releases coming down the pipeline right now, but the lack of continued updates for an Android device remains — unfortunately — unsurprising.
The brevity of support reiterates what’s still one of the biggest issues for Android devices. Outside of Google’s official Nexus line, prolonged support has been all but impossible to come by. But the story is different elsewhere in the smartphone market: Apple has continued to support even its three-year-old iPhone 4, which will be getting updated to iOS 7 this fall. For its part, HTC has done better in the past. Though update support for the One S is ending somewhat abruptly, the phone did receive 4.1 Jelly Bean just a few months after the operating system’s release.
