Review: The $229 Moto G5 Plus stands as the king of budget Android (for now)
We've documented the decline of Motorola under Lenovo extensively. We still liked the phones, which had probably been developed mostly under Google's ownership anyway, but in 2015 we started to see slower updates and shorter support lifecycles. Last year was when the wheels really started to come off. Not only did the company mostly ruin its flagship phone by swapping the inexpensive and competent Moto X for the expensive and weird Moto Z, but Lenovo issued several contradictory statements about software updates that made it unclear whether the Z or the fourth-generation Moto G would be receiving regular updates at all.
It's not all bad. The Moto G4, especially the G4 Plus configuration, was still a solid midrange phone that offered good-enough performance, a nice big 1080p screen, and a fingerprint reader for $250. Unlike the Moto Z, it at least understood and respected the intent behind the original 2013 Moto G: an affordable phone with clean, unskinned Android and no-to-low-frills hardware that got the job done. Its lack of updates over the last nine months has been disappointing, but that's the norm in the Android world rather than the exception.
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