Software

The U11 still includes HTC's Sense skin atop Android seven.one, but the company has worked hard to amend Sense over the last few years, stripping out a lot of unnecessary crap in favour of stock Android elements. The end result is one of the amend skins currently bachelor, certainly better than Samsung or LG'south offerings.

Many primal areas of Sense are substantially stock Android. The notification pane, settings screen, and several stock apps are either directly from Google, or simply minor modifications on what Google provides in the vanilla feel. The launcher is pretty similar too, aside from the app drawer, which uses HTC's Sense style.

Sense really looks quite good these days from a blueprint perspective. HTC has looked closely at what Google provides, and expanded that theme for their additions here. As a result, Sense almost looks like a natural extension of Android, and that's the marker of a bang-up Android skin: ane that melds in well with stock Android design elements, as of course some stock elements (and apps) are mandatory inclusions.

In that location are very few bloatware applications on the U11. Bated from HTC's Postal service application duplicating functionality provided in Gmail, in that location are no other duplicate apps. HTC uses Google's Photo and Calendar apps for their respective functions. Even Google Play Music is utilized over a stock music app. HTC has chucked some unnecessary apps on the phone like Under Amour Record and News Republic, simply these apps tin can exist uninstalled so it's non a big deal.

HTC includes a Boost+ app on the U11, which we've seen before in Sense previously. Like many other Asian phones, this sort of app includes junk-clearing functions and "speed boosting" features, which vary in their usability. BlinkFeed is also included, which first debuted many years ago now every bit a decent news aggregator integrated into the dwelling screen. Of course you tin disable BlinkFeed if you don't want to apply it.

At that place aren't many other outstanding features in Sense. Things like theming back up and several battery saver features are now widespread among Android devices, fifty-fifty though HTC'due south implementation differs slightly from other skins and stock Android.

One affair I am concerned about is HTC'south update track record. Pretty much every OEM that isn't Google has a somewhat poor rail record of pushing out software updates and, most importantly, security patches. Judging past their support for phones similar the HTC ten, HTC's tape is above boilerplate, taking a couple of months to roll out Android 7.0 after it was released. Their phones go on to be supported into the futurity also, though we'll have to wait and see what they end upward doing with the U11.