Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.

FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June.

Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t.

Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now.

The extension of the platform tools available to Now partners was announced by Google’s Baris Gultekin, who was one of the creators of Google Now, which sprung out of a project he came up with in his so-called “20 percent time.” He spoke with Google’s Louis Gray ont he Developer Live video stream which ran throughout the I/O conference this year.

Gultekin was talking about ways in which Google is working to improve the quality and relevancy of the recommendations and data it surfaces. The project sounds like it’s fairly limited for now, but asking for help from the input sources of data seems like a smart way to supplement Google’s own data detection algorithms that are working to flag interesting data for Now’s use on their own data center side. Doing all the heavy lifting themselves might be more impressive, but if reaching out to partners can help improve user experience, then there’s no reason not to extend that hand.

Mozilla today bumped up Firefox Aurora, the pre-beta release channel of the popular browser, to version 23. With this, it is introducing a number of new tools for developers that will now slowly make their way into the stable release channel over the next few months. Sadly (or maybe not), this is also the first version of Firefox that does away with the good old <blink> element, a former staple of the horrid GeoCities websites of the 90s.

On the user-facing side of things, this Aurora release also includes support for Firefox’s Mixed Content Blocker, which should keep users a bit safer when sites contain both HTTP and HTTPs resources. For Mac users, it includes new animations for swipe navigations and — finally — support for OSX 10.7′s new scrollbar style.

The focus of this release is clearly on developers, though. Firefox Aurora now features a new network monitor that provides a standard waterfall timeline view of network activity on any given page. This data has always been available, but only through the Web Console, which wasn’t very easy to interpret.

Google’s Vikram Aggarwal, a software engineer working on the Android platform, revealed today that Gmail and Email, the native Android client that still ships on Android devices as well, now has a combined user base of more than 100 million across the Android install base. It’s an interesting stat, because although Gmail and Email only represent two of a multitude of email clients available on Android, it’s likely that those two represent the email clients of choice for a wide swath of Android users.

This means that a 100-million-strong active user base for those two combined is probably a pretty good reflection of the total active user base of Android itself, give or take a few million users. That’s a good figure to get, since we usually see more about total activations, which is a far less accurate measure of how many people are currently using devices. Activations occur whenever there is a full device reset, for instance, and people often upgrade to new phones, meaning their previous activation is no longer an active one.

Google has passed 900 million Android activations, the company revealed at the I/O keynote earlier this week. Put in context of a 100-million-strong active user base for the core email apps operating on the platform, however, we get a picture of Android users which is much more down to earth. Estimates of active Apple devices have to take into account the 500 million sold to date, with over 300 million now on iOS 6. Updated to that version or being sold with it installed indicates there’s a good chance a lot of those are still in active use.

Uh oh.

Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot.

As I noted in the post at the time, I was actually a bit surprised to see Apple green light this one to begin with. The guys behind the app tried to chaste things up a bit for Apple, changing the name for the iOS version of their app to the slightly more inconspicuous “BWF” (The Android app, meanwhile, is still just “Bang With Friends”. Google don’t give no damns.)