In case you’re not aware, Google, in partnership with HTC and Samsung, have given the United States what many of us in the tech community have wanted for a very long time – the ability to have the phone we want, free from any carrier or manufacturer bloatware. The Nexus experience on non-Nexus hardware.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, though, we missed out – the Google Play Editions of the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S 4 aren’t sold internationally, and we can’t really import them either, as they are incompatible with the LTE bands we use in Australia. But fortunately for us, the chaps over at XDA-developers have gotten their hands on a pure, unadulterated system dump of the HTC One GPE, and have ported it for the rest of us. The ROM has been deodexed and pre-rooted, but other than that it’s exactly as Google intended. If you want to give the Google Experience a try, your One will need to be running a custom recovery, such as TWRP or ClockworkMod,and please, for the love of god, make a backup of your current setup. You can download the ROM from the XDA thread here.