When we heard that the Moto X was already getting Lollipop, the Android geek inside of us all started jumping up and down. And we got even more excited when it started rolling out to the LG G3, at least in South Korea and Poland. Many of us remember how long it took to get updates a couple years ago. Anyone that was on Gingerbread will remember how long it took to get Ice Cream Sandwich. Well I have a Motorola Moto X here with Lollipop on here, it’s the Verizon variant for those wondering, and I’m here to tell you that there are some disadvantages to getting updates quickly, although a lot of them don’t hit the Moto X.
One of the biggest things we noticed about Android 5.0 on the LG G3 was, it looked exactly the same as KitKat did. There’s basically no material design influence there at all. Which is kinda the biggest feature in Lollipop, at least in my opinion. While we didn’t expect a whole lot of material design, especially from skinned Android phones, in the most recently leaked video from Samsung’s Lollipop update, it appears that Samsung is embracing Material Design, at least a little bit.
Another one is bugs. This one actually pertains to the Moto X. One of the things I see here is with the Moto Display turned on, and you unlock it sometimes it’ll take you to the Lollipop lock screen and you have to unlock that one as well. Not a huge deal, but it can definitely get annoying. We also have Moto Display and Ambient Display here, which can get confusing, so you’ll want to turn one of those off. I’d suggest turning off Ambient Display, as I really like Moto Display and think it works better. There’s a few other small things, but no real show stopping bugs, and most of the bugs are the same as in the Nexus 6.
For the most part, quick updates are amazing. They really only affect skinned phones from LG, HTC, Samsung, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, etc., but for ZTE and Motorola it works great since they run stock Android. Most probably won’t care about not having material design on their LG G3, but for those of us that are Android geeks we will definitely care, right?