The modular nature of Android is one of the many things that not only makes it unique among other mobile operating systems, but what truly makes it better than them as well. Basically the concept goes like this: don’t like your launcher, dialer, messaging app, browser or really just about anything else on your phone? Switch it out with one of the many (sometimes hundreds) of alternatives on the Play Store until you find the one that’s just right for you. Motorola and Google showed us with the Moto X that there’s another great thing about modularization: bypassing the carrier update schedule and directly updating apps and other OS pieces automatically through the Play Store. Obviously it wasn’t just consumers that saw this as a big plus, HTC has now jumped fully on board with the concept, releasing Blinkfeed and a bunch of other apps on the Play Store this morning. In addition to that it looks like they’ve also released SenseTV on the Play Store, and it marks a whole new set of features that are bound to ship with The All New HTC One when it gets announced today.
Last year Samsung and HTC stuck IR blasters on the Galaxy S4 and HTC One, bringing back an old feature that died out a few years ago but was obviously sorely missed. Just like those the HTC SenseTV app uses your phone’s IR blaster to give your phone the power of being the only remote needed in any given room. This version is a redesigned and restyled version of last year’s app and coincides with the launch of Sense 6.0, which is HTC’s Android skin. Of course it seems like the app is restricted to the HTC One Google Play edition, HTC One and the All New HTC One, and the likelihood of seeing official support on other devices is pretty low. Still HTC hasn’t put this app on the Play Store to use on other devices, rather to allow them to update it when they need to without having to send out a complete system update with the new app in tow. This sort of modularization cuts down not only on wait time and download size, but builds confidence in a brand by giving the consumer peace of mind and proving that their device will be supported long after the initial launch window.
