We learned during a Q&A session at Mobile World Congress earlier this week that the Moto G was Motorola’s most successful phone of all time. Which is saying something since the Moto G is a very low-end device, but it is available virtually everywhere now. At Mobile World Congress, a few of Motorola’s SVP’s including Software Engineer Steve Horowitz spoke about the company’s time under Google’s wing. We had heard in the past that Google had nothing to do with Motorola’s success while Google owned them. Basically that there was no special attention given to Motorola by Google. Horowitz reminded us that the popularity of Motorola’s newest handsets are a result of Motorola, and not a result of Google being in control.
When it came to the Moto X and Moto G, Supply Chain and Operations SVP Mark Randall stated that the innovations there came from listening to customers and responding to them. Another way of telling us that this came from Motorola instead of Google. Not only with the launches of the Moto X and Moto G could we tell that Motorola listened to their customers but afterwards as well. Since Motorola made the developer editions keep their warranty when you unlock the bootloader and root them. That’s something customers really wanted.
There’s another interesting piece of the puzzle here, Google had nothing to do with Motorola’s vision of Android. Randall says that he and Horowitz had to wait in the lobby before meetings like every other OEM. Horowitz also stated:
“I know where [our] strengths are and I feel that Android’s something to leave with the Android engineers. We’re not about making useless changes. This strategy lets us ship Android upgrades at a much faster rate than anyone else. For example we shipped our KitKat upgrade to the Moto X 19 days after release.”
Lets hope all this hard work that Motorola has put in, in the last year or so doesn’t go unnoticed and that Lenovo doesn’t undo all the hard work they’ve done.