Confirmed: HTC One with stock Android coming June 26

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The $599 unlocked phone will join the Nexus edition of Samsung's Galaxy S 4.

The "Nexus experience" HTC One is real, and it's coming soon.

There's no question that the HTC One is a very high-quality smartphone, but if you don't care for HTC's Sense 5 UI, we've got good news for you. Google's Sundar Pichai, who has been running the Android team since Andy Rubin's departure in March, just announced that a stock Android edition of the HTC One would be coming to the Google Play store on June 26th. This follows several insistent rumors that Google and HTC were preparing to do exactly that.

Pichai made the announcement at the D11 conference (as reported by Engadget), and HTC quickly made things official on its own site. The "Nexus experience" edition of the One will include stock Android 4.2, an unlockable bootloader, and the same GSM/EDGE, HSPA+, and LTE connectivity options as other versions of the phone. It will also come with 32GB of storage and will run you $599, $50 less than the Nexus experience version of Samsung's Galaxy S 4 announced at Google I/O.

Between this and the S 4, one begins to wonder if these "Nexus experience" phones are just another front in Google's battle against Android fragmentation or if these kinds of phones will eventually replace the special Nexus phones that Google has been making for the last few years. We've reached out to Google for comment (and to see whether the company is ready to announce any other Nexus experience phones from its partners) and will update this article if we receive a response.

Update: Pichai mentioned at D11 that Google would continue to make Nexus phones with its partners. A Google representative said these would continue to be used to "push hardware forward with partners." The Google rep also told us that the company "hope to partner with more OEMs in the near future" on more Nexus experience devices, so don't expect the stock HTC One to be the last one we see.

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