If you wanted to swap Sense 5 for stock Android on your HTC One, the first step to accomplish that is ready. Once again, the folks at xda-developers come to the rescue and have managed to get the stock recovery and bootloader out of the HTC One Google Play edition and ready to be flashed on any other HTC One. As I said before, this is just the first step for changing your phone into a Google Play edition, since we’re still missing the complete system image, which is already being worked on. This means that you’ll find a stock Android ROM for your HTC One in no time.
Once the image is ready, all you have to do is follow the instructions in the forum post for flashing everything and you’re done, your HTC One will become a Google Play edition and will be on track to receiving OTA updates just like the ones that shipped from Google.
Don’t forget that by moving away from Sense you’ll also lose its features like the IR Blaster, Highlights, Zoes and BlinkFeed to name a few. But if you’re interested into stock Android, you already knew that. Your other option is to wait for MoDaCo.switch and enjoy the best of both worlds.
Before all this, we weren’t sure how many Google Play edition devices were going to be sold, it was already a niche product and now, many people won’t even have to buy it to experience it, so in the end, this might hurt the already few sales the HTC One Google Play edition was going to get. Still, the fact that stock Android is getting so much interest worldwide seems to be pretty much all Google had in mind when they decided to come up with these versions since Google doesn’t care about devices sold but they just want as many people on board the platform as possible, and if it is using stock Android with Google in control, all the better.
If you want the HTC One GPe you can purchase it in the Play Store for $599 or you can go for the other stock Android options with the Samsung Galaxy S IV GPe at $649 and the Nexus 4 for $399 for the 16GB version.