Motorola launched the Moto X with a camera that showed poor performance in the beginning, but the good news was that it was obvious the main problem with the camera was in software, and once they fixed the software part, it became a lot more competitive with this year’s smartphones.
Suffice to say that the upgrade was very important for many Moto X owners, but as usual, some carriers make upgrading their customers’ phones much slower than necessary. Motorola seems to have lost its patience, and if you own a Moto X, you can now download the new improved Moto X camera app directly from the Play Store.
This is an interesting move from Motorola, and something we can probably expect a lot more from Google themselves in the future. Google has already started doing this with their own Google apps since Froyo, and recently they’ve started doing it with stock Android features and apps, too, such as the keyboard app.
If Google can never truly take control of the whole Android again, and make it so they upgrade the whole Android OS on all devices, by themselves, like they do with Chromebooks, perhaps they will try the next best thing. They can “upgrade” those “other” phones, that don’t come with stock Android, with new features and apps, by releasing them to the Play Store, and then allowing users to install them by themselves, and use the “Google Experience”, and all that entails even on non-stock Android devices.
Thanks to the Play Services framework, they can also continue to ensure that they can fix a lot of security bugs, too, for all of those devices. All of this could mean that while Google won’t be upgrading the whole OS from the ground up for all the other devices, they may at least upgrade those devices with the most recent and most important apps and functionality of “stock Android”, or rather the “Google Experience” Android. I would expect this to happen a lot more often in the future.