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Motorola announced today that the Edge+ is being promised at least two Android OS upgrades. Meaning that it’ll get Android 11 and Android 12. And if everything goes properly, it could also get Android 13 in 2022. Which would be really impressive.
The company is also making sure that everyone knows, ahead of the May 14 release of the Edge+, that it does run a clean version of Android 10. And it is not skinned like LG, Samsung and other smartphones on the market.
This is a big and welcomed change for Motorola
In recent years, largely since Lenovo purchase the company from Google, Motorola has been pretty lackluster when it comes to updates. In fact, with the Moto Z4 that launched last year, Motorola didn’t even promise that it would get Android 10 – which went stable about a month after the Moto Z4 was announced.
That really pissed off a lot of customers, and those of us in the media. In fact, I wrote a pretty fiery editorial about why customers shouldn’t buy any Motorola phones until they figure out how to do updates.
Surprisingly, this week Motorola decided to change course.
Just yesterday, it announced the the razr was getting Android 10 (rolling out now actually!) and the Moto G7, G7 Power are both getting the update now. The razr was also promised an update to Android 11. And now the the Edge+ is going to be getting Android 11 and Android 12 too.
That’s a big change for Motorola, and makes it a bit easier to recommend one of their phones. Especially one that costs $999 like the Edge+.
Most customers don’t care about updates, but OEMs should still provide them
We’ve heard from some OEMs that their customers really don’t care about updates. In fact, some customers hate them because they bring change. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for not providing updates.
Motorola used to be pretty impressive with updates, when it was under Google’s ownership. Of course, that might have had something to do with it. Especially back with the original Moto X, pushing out updates to the Verizon variant well ahead of others. That was impressive, seeing as Verizon usually stalls updates for certification and normally they are some of the last to get updated.
Now it looks like Motorola is returning to that place, where it actually updates its phones. Though, we’ll have to wait to see how fast it updates these phones. It could be very quickly after Android 11 goes stable, or many months later. As far as security updates go, we’re still expecting one a quarter from Motorola. Which isn’t too shabby.