So we’re sure that everybody reading this article has surely heard about the lawsuit against HTC being laid out by Apple. We’ve seen these large companies  pose lawsuit after lawsuit throughout the years, and this instance is no different, and will likely end up being settled out of court for a monetary amount somewhere in the Millions. We previously gave you a list of the patents that were infringed upon, but the titles were pretty cryptic. We figure that many people would like to know exactly what Apple is suing HTC for, and here is an explanation on some of the patents that we listed.

“Time-based, non-constant translation of user interface objects between states” is a patent upon the way a row of icons automatically rearrange when an additional icon is added or removed. Without this feature - Android’s menus would be riddled with random gaps, and you would be forced to manually drag icons to fill the gaps if you wanted an organized menu.

“Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image” is a patent which grant Apple exclusive rights to unlocking a phone with a gesture movement on an unlock image. Because the patent is so general, this patent can cover a wide array of different swiping gestures in order to unlock the phone. Without this patent, there would need to be an additional physical button with the sole purpose of unlocking the phone - or just have a phone that has no lock screen altogether, which we all know would be a bad idea.

“Method and apparatus for distributing events in an operating system” is merely a fancy, technological way of describing how a phone relates to notifications changing behavior of applications, like what happens in the event of a power failure. Normally an Android phone will notify you when your battery is running low, and will shut down GPS in order to conserve battery life - but that would be gone.

“Message protocol for controlling a user interface from an inactive program” is a long way to describe Multitasking, or how a foreground application remains active while an application running in the background is also processing. Without this feature, if you’re on the internet typing an e-mail, and someone calls you, then you will lose the email that you were writing. If you want to listen to music while you surf the web, you can’t.

Now, we’re pretty sure that none of this will come to result out of this lawsuit, but it wouldn’t be a very good result for any Android users, or the developers of Android. But, as we stated before, this case will likely be settled out of court. We’ll keep bringing you updates as they develop, only at AndroidTrek.com. [Wired]