Apple has won one round in the battle against HTC, with the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruling that HTC's Android phones infringed an Apple patent dealing with context menus. In light of this finding, the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE have been held up at Customs, blocked from entering the United States.

HTC Shipping Custom Version of Android in the U.S.

This issue, however, may be over soon, as it seems HTC is shipping a custom version of Android in the U.S., without such infringing context menus. The Verge has cited sources confirming that both the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE exclude the infringing feature.

"That's confirmed by our own examination of an AT&T One X and Sprint Evo 4G LTE, neither of which exhibit the key behavior excluded from importation into the US by the International Trade Commission, and which both include a new settings screen not present in the international One X," The Verge reported.

ITC Exclusion Order

The ITC had found that HTC's messaging app, along with the stock Android messaging app and the stock Android browser infringed an Apple patent. Apple's patent #5,946,647 deals with how a phone number or email address is handled in text and then presented in a menu of options when a user clicks on those detected structures. The global version of the HTC One X may still feature the infringing behavior, but the One X and EVO 4G LTE for the U.S. do not.

With AT&T's HTC One X and Sprint's EVO 4G LTE, tapping on a detected phone number or email address will launch the dialer or email client, and the U.S. versions also feature a new "app associations" setting screen, allowing users to specify default apps for email, maps and others such. Meanwhile, the global version lacks does not feature this screen setting and instead pops up a context menu when a user clicks on an email address for the first time.

Compliance

It is not yet certain whether these tweaks are enough to make the HTC One X and EVO 4G LTE in accordance with the ITC exclusion order, especially as Customs has a very broad interpretive power. What is clear, however, is that Apple's impressive patent portfolio is starting to weigh heavily on Android, and not just when it comes to the design changes noticed at the Mobile World Congress. With this latest move, HTC seems to be shipping devices with considerably different functionality in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world, and Android manufacturers may also have to ship different versions of their software worldwide in order to stay out of such patent disputes.