Here's a quick quiz:

A major, international Android smartphone maker releases a smaller version of its flagship device. That mini flagship may not be quite on par with the overpowered top-of-the-line premium phone market, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. Meanwhile, that manufacturer sees its brand flagging in markets across the world. Then, one year later -- the very next year -- despite promising two years of device support on its products, that company decides its one year old mini flagship isn't worth updating to the latest version of Android.

Which company is planning on losing any semblance of customer loyalty with such an idiotic betrayal of its mid-range buyers? It's HTC, which just announced that the neither the HTC One Mini (2013) nor the HTC One Mini 2 (2014) will not be updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop. Ever.

The unbelievable and justifiably infuriating news came from the official @HTC Twitter account, via Digital Trends, recently. When asked when the Android 5.0 Lollipop update would be hitting the HTC One Mini 2 -- a device launched May 2014 as a cheaper, smaller alternative to the HTC One M8 -- the HTC twitter account replied with the following tweet:

Days later, HTC announced the older 2013 One Mini would also not be getting Lollipop.

Besides setting off a firestorm of angry tweets from customers -- completely reasonably angry since the major smartphone and variant of a premium flagship brand name is less than a year old for most buyers -- the decision not to update at least 2014's One Mini variant doesn't make much sense.

Ever since KitKat, and certainly with Lollipop, Google has striven to keep newer Android updates low on storage footprint (only 1GB for Lollipop at most), as well as to engineer Android to run faster on older devices.

HTC's demurral on releasing a Lollipop update for the 2014 device smacks more of laziness than any kind of determination that Lollipop wouldn't provide "an optimal experience" -- especially as older smartphones like the Sony Xperia Z, which for Pete's sake, launched running Android 4.1, are getting Lollipop.

Do you have an HTC One Mini 2? What non-HTC smartphone are you planning on getting next? Let us know in the comments!