In my case, I made the upgrade to my new HTC One unlocked.
I live in Argentina, I bought this phone in Amazon, I made the upgrade one week ago.
The update was made and accepted by me, because, the OS let do this to me.
No warning, no message, no nothing.
Once it restart automatically, it's stops at the screen that said "HTC Quietly brilliant".
I call to support from HTC, they sent me the intrucctions to made a recovery, a factory reset, a recovery with a "wipe cache partition".-
Nothing different happened.
I'm a user with some technicall knowledge, the phone is not rooted, it was as they sent me when I bought.
Now, HTC, told me that I have to send back to USA, to repair it, because the update is not for latinamerica.
So, I think that HTC made a big mistake, because they try, only try, to upgrade a phone that is not in USA, that is located in Argentina.
It's no depends on a back-up, a factory reset or whatever, it's a big failure on the procedure and I'm paying the price of their mistakes.
My phone, now, is just a expensive and a pretty case.
Pretty much all carriers (and OEMs for that matter) will provide OTAs without a required data wipe (a.k.a. factory reset) because it's much easier on the user AND the carrier if they don't have to worry about instructing everyone how to backup their data first. In their mind, from a customer support perspective, it's easier to suggest doing a factory reset after the fact if a user comes to them with post-update issues, than to simply require it across the board and face the wrath of customers who are upset that their data was wiped.
The problem is that, of course, after almost major update to any Android phone, there are a ton of threads posted from users stating that "This update sucks! it ruined my battery life and my phone crashes all the time!!!"...but the reality is that 99 times out of 100, the update itself is fine, it's just that because there wasn't a factory reset done, it was technically installed improperly. Now, many people may install with no factory reset and have no problems at all, but the fact remains that when doing a major update there is a lot of data that gets carried over to the new version, and there are a lot of opportunities for incompatibility or corruption of that data. Without a factory reset, it is simply impossible to determine the cause of any "bugs" that may appear, as they may be tied to either the update itself of the existing data and settings carried over from the previous version. There are times when I think carriers and OEMs should force factory resets when updating the OS, but as I stated above, I understand why they don't.
Having said all of that, I think that we educated users (those of us to take the time to read Android Central and participate in the forums), should be prepared to install an update properly*. A lot of Google's stuff is already backed up to the cloud, and there are quite a few apps out there that can facilitate backing up pretty much everything else, including SMS messages and things like that. If you use a custom launcher, like Nova, it's even quite easy to backup and restore your home screen configuration...though I understand why many prefer to stick with the stock launcher instead. When a new update is available, especially a MAJOR update that involves a new Android version, my recommendation would be to backup everything that you can, install the update, then immediately do a factory reset and run though the setup wizard again and restore data as needed. If you choose not to do that, it's your prerogative, but you should at least understand that before you can complain about any bugs your phone may experience, that a factory reset should be completed first. Just realizing this can take a lot of the worry and frustration out of the updating process, IMO. Just my 2?
*I use the term "properly" as a subjective term that reflects my opinion...yours may vary.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram