HTC, One less Android Soldier To Count. Is Android Changing?

Oh HTC, what happened to you? The once mighty, sayer and commander of the past fragile Android army, now, a cocoon of their once didn’t self, HTC makes another straight for the window! So what’s going on? Armed with the clever disguise of a “your website may confuse users… so please stop this, and please stop that” malarkey, they secretly waged war on the super important RUU distribution channels.

If you’re an old WinMo guy like me, RUU brings a smile to you face, but that bios bypass tool if you will, still holds the same important to the Android community, if you own a HTC device that is. RUU is pretty much the staircase to root heaven, and as we all know, you probably only buy an Android phone for one reason, to root it, or so I’d like to think.

With HTC’s stock price falling at the speed of apples from trees (sorry, I just had to,) I would consider this to be a fairly silly thing to do. The company was already in trouble based on who you asked, but now that they’ve gone and upset the core community they had left, mindshare might as well go right on out the door with the stock price. Hello Samsung!

But hold on, before we finish driving the nails where they might not belong, is this all HTC? I would like to give a quick mention to the awesome that is Jelly Bean, and maybe a wink or two to ICS. With an OS that stable, who needs to root, flash, tinker or any of that silly geek like stuff. After all, the purpose of that all is to fix what the carrier/OEM could now, correct? What happens when its all done right from the start, would you value RUU any more? Hmmmm, does this mean the landscape of the Android army is faced with yet another major shift? Or is HTC just another Apple lost in the woods….