Motorola Gets Raked for Not Updating Moto G4 Plus to Oreo as Promised, Says It Now Will

At the end of last week, Motorola released its list of phones scheduled to receive the update to Android Oreo. As you guys know, the Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus, two phones that are just barely a year old, were left off of the list. People were pissed initially, but over the weekend became even more livid as they discovered promo materials for the phone that suggested the phone would see both Android N and Android O updates. Because of that, Motorola says they will now update the Moto G4 Plus to Oreo, though we aren’t sure when.

I’d try to catch you up on the marketing material event that went down over the weekend, but you’ll find it all at this reddit thread. The basics are this. Some Moto G4 owners looked back at the original marketing materials for the phone and noticed that it said to expect an update to both Android N and Android O. Those mentions have since been scrubbed from Moto G4 materials, which of course, is never a good look.

Motorola responded today with the following to their Oreo updates blog post:

Since the time of posting this, we have learned of some errors in our marketing materials around Android O upgrades for moto g4 Plus. It’s our general practice for the moto g family to get one major OS upgrade per device, so it wasn’t originally planned for Android O. But it’s important to us we keep our promises, so in addition to the N upgrade it has already received, we will be upgrading moto g4 Plus to Android O. Because this is an unplanned upgrade, it will take some time to fit into our schedule, we’ll update our software upgrade page when we have more info.

In other words, we now know that Motorola only updates its Moto G line for a single year. To expect anything beyond that is silly on your part going forward. Whether that’s cool of Motorola or not is a conversation for another day, but they have made it clear that this is how they treat their mid-range phones. If I were buying into a mid-range line in the near future, I’d certainly hesitate with the next Moto G if this is Motorola’s stance.

Also, that statement only says Moto G4 Plus and not Moto G4. Sorry, Moto G4 owners.

Finally, it’s anyone’s guess when your Moto G4 Plus will see the update. As Motorola noted, this is an “unplanned upgrade,” so it could end up at the back of the pack. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t end up on the bottom of the list only to never see it.

// Motorola