Just as with previous uSonic earbuds bundled in with HTC phones, it seems that those earbuds boxed with the U11 will only work best with the phone it comes with, PhoneArena reports.

But that’s not to say it won’t work with other phones. The outlet contacted the company’s global PR lead Jeff Gordon and was told that the earbuds will work with phones that have enabled powered audio through USB-C — choice examples include the U Ultra, U Play and the HTC 10 evo (the Bolt on Sprint).

But there’s a reasonable feature drop-out here: the built-in noise cancelling. You see, the uSonic earbuds connect through to the HTC U11’s array of microphones that capture sound from all sides of the device. The phone does most of the work to cut it out and it gets sent to the user. That process would be fairly proprietary we’d think.

What we are trying to get clarification on is if the uSonic’s native in-ear tuning still works on other phones — the buds have microphones that record how sound reflects in the ear canal and, with HTC software, adjust the EQ to best suit it.

Since HTC ports out its native apps to the Google Play Store, it could just move a uSonic app out and make it available for all phones as a show of goodwill. However, the company is within its rights to keep users in its ecosystem by limiting portability. We’ll update once we hear back.