[Rant] Reality Check - HTC Has Plans For Bluetooth LE And OpenGL ES 3.0 But It Doesn't Make Them "Android 4.3 Features"

• OpenGL ES 3.0
• Bluetooth Low-Energy
• HTC's Statement

It's 4 a.m., I just read the 6th mention of the same misleading story in the last 24 hours, and it's time for a rant.

Yesterday, several "independent" reports all claiming to arrive at the same conclusion at the same time (does anyone properly credit their sources anymore?) appeared on the web suggesting HTC had just (*gasp*) leaked two new Android 4.3 features: Bluetooth Low-Energy and OpenGL ES 3.0. And it's done so via a public meetup organized by the San Francisco Android User Group. HTC is so careless that they've just published not one but two unreleased features coming in the next version of Android and therefore protected by strict NDAs. What a scoop!

Reality check time. What we're seeing here is a classic case of jumping to premature conclusions (is it time for an industry-wide intervention on jumping to conclusions yet?). Indeed, HTC is going to be introducing some improvements for some of their devices in the future, but it doesn't mean that they will come as part of Android 4.3, 5.0, or any version of Android as a whole. Let me break down each announced feature.

OpenGL ES 3.0

In August of 2012, Khronos finalized the spec for OpenGL ES 3.0. The latest iteration promised better texture compression, improved compatibility with desktops, optimized battery consumption, and other things developers have been salivating about ever since.

In February of 2013, Qualcomm announced OpenGL ES 3.0 certification for its Snapdragon 600/800 processors' Adreno GPUs, which even further points at a driver update for Adreno rather than anything to do with the next version of Android.

On March 27 2013, HTC told The Inquirer that OpenGL ES 3.0 would be available for the HTC One in a future update. There no mention of Android 4.3 or an update to the OS version whatsoever.

Bluetooth Low-Energy

HTC has had a BLE sign-up page for partners for a long time now - it's not even new information, contrary to the suggestions that it was leaked in the meetup.

GATT access will be enabled on all mainline HTC devices launching in and after this quarter.

Once again, no indication that it will be a feature of Android. Rather, the page is published as part of the OpenSense SDK and listed under partner APIs, meaning something HTC has itself developed on top of Android.

Hey, look - Samsung has done the same recently. In fact, Samsung is currently one step ahead of HTC, as its BLE SDK has been actually open to the public and not just partners for the last 3 weeks.

HTC's Statement

Furthermore, HTC's developer evangelist Dario Laverde has since provided the following update, which is reflected in SlashGear's story:

To clarify, well have some surprises for the meeting but were not claiming unannounced new features here well be demoing features and APIs already available on HTC devices.

Dario Laverde, HTC

tl;dr: HTC is going to be adding some new features but there is no indication that they have anything to do with Android as a whole. By all means, it would be nice if they did - in fact, I'd be surprised if Google doesn't end up adding them in the future. But that's besides the point.

Bonus: If you haven't read Eric's excellent editorial entitled Stop Making Crap Up And Then Whining About It, I highly recommend you do it now.

Image credit: wbez.org

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