Correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems that HTC is the more developer friendly company among the various Android packagers.

I was so keen on getting a Samsung I7500, but HTC seems to be much better in packaging the latest release and also releasing the source.

I would tend to agree, but it might be unfair, I have a bias towards HTC because of their overall high level of quality.

Bias aside, they seem to be very committed to the nature of AOSP and they also seem motivated to help it grow.

They're also very honest about their problems. The @htc on Twitter has openly acknowledged some of the early bugs with Hero, particularly in regards to the blocking on network IO when signed into Facebook and the Twitter 32 bit post limit. He's kept us all informed regarly while HTC engineers work on problems and told us as soon as the updates have come out.

He isn't always in a position to say something - people have recently noticed a bug in the messaging app that when fixed increases the battery life remarkably - but as soon as he does he tells their customers.

This is true, though it did take a few months of people hassling them about GPL violations before they posted the source

I think you're absolutely correct. They seem to be the most transparent company in that sense.

To be clear, HTC was legally required to provide the source code and it apparently took prodding from developers of the code they used to make it happen[1].

They may be more developer friendly than other Android packagers, but I wouldn't consider the release of this code as evidence of that.

[1] http://www.phonenews.com/htc-releases-hero-source-code-for-d...

I love my HTC Hero! :)