[pyrelight]

Motorola does a pretty good job. Their "bloatware" is mostly the Moto app, which provides really handy and reliable gestures like a double "chop" to toggle flashlight, twisting the phone a few times to enable the camera, three-finger screenshot trigger, etc.

Their phones are really solid but they do lag on OS updates, and their cameras are never good.

[djaychela]

Came here to say pretty much exactly that. I've been on a series of moto G phones, from the 5 to my current G83. Good value, the moto app actually adds functionality without being a drag (or even mandatory to use).

Cameras are always sub-par (partner has pixels, and I'm light years behind), although the latest is the least bad in comparison with her current phone.

Current one has survived most of me building a home extension with little damage...previous one developed an intermittent screen touch issue, but only after I dropped it 12 feet onto a concrete floor,so I can't complain on reliability either.

[agent008t]

Just want to mention that the moto camera is made FAR worse by the software.

E.g. video on my moto would always be blurry due to bad de-noising settings used by stock software. mcpro24fps allowed me to take dramatically better videos. The difference was HUGE.

Same with photos. Custom gcam roms, after a long time of trying different ones and tweaking, gave me dramatically higher quality photos. Again, night and day difference.

So the hardware is fine; they shoot themselves in the foot with the software.

[all2]

Can you provide more details about your current setup? Firmware versions, diffs, settings, etc? Maybe tutorials you used to get your camera into good shape?

[agent008t]

Moto G31(w), running Android 11.

Tried loads of GCam versions, the one that worked best was LMC8.4R8. Camera and Night Sight work amazingly well, and all 3 cameras are supported.

For videos however I had to use mcpro24fps. I don't recall the details now, but basically videos from stock camera app looked far blurrier than the photos, suggesting a software issue. It turned out to be some denoising feature that is on by default with no option to switch it off. You can also try it out by installing Open Camera, enabling Camera2 API and disabling Noise Reduction in Processing settings.

Unfortunately, I have not found a way to record slow-motion (high-fps) videos without the noise-reduction blur.

Another thing about the Moto G phones is that they seem to often come with the compass uncalibrated to the point of being useless. Here are some instructions: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/moto-g31/Compass-application-fo...

So in other words, great hardware at an amazing price let down by lousy software.

[Crosseye_Jack]

> but only after I dropped it 12 feet onto a concrete floor

My brain went right to old Nokia phones and I thinking "Thank fuck it was a Motorola, back in the day you would have to had the foundations checked over if it had been an Nokia"

But yeah, Always been happy with Motorola G phones (bar the cvamera, but I'm not really a photo person anyway), I still have an old 2014 Moto G to test apps on old devices/Android.

[OkayPhysicist]

Last two phones have been Moto G Powers. Multiday battery life, stock Android, SIM and MicroSD cards, and a headphone jack.

Camera's definitely terrible, but I don't really use my phone camera all that much. Biggest advantage, IMO, is the <$150 price tag. It means when I trip and toss my phone into traffic, or forget to take my phone out of my pocket when going snorkeling, or drop my phone off the balcony of my apartment, I can just order a new one on Amazon, swap the SIM, and carry on with my life.

[jjice]

Tangential but I really miss the gestures. I'm much happier with my Pixel 6a, but I had a run of Motorola phones beforehand. God the shake for flashlight and rotate for camera were godsends. Everyone got a kick out of it too, it was always funny to see people react to how great shake for flashlight was.

I wonder if there's an app that can do this now on any phone, but I hadn't thought to look until now.

[rafabulsing]

The brief period I spent with a non Moto phone got me missing the gestures so much as well. It's actually kind of insane how useful the flashlight gesture is. I realized that I actually don't really have a concept of not being to see anymore: anytime I entered a room that was too dark for whatever reason, the muscle memory kicked in immediately. Crazy.

On the non Moto phone I tried replicating it with Tasker. It worked... Sometimes. But it was a really cheap random Redmi model so that might have been the issue, more than the app itself.

[ptmcc]

It's not exactly the same, but iOS has an accessibility feature where you can map double and triple tapping the back of the phone to things like turning the flashlight on and off.

It's nearly like shaking and uses the gyros because there's no touch interface there.

[tootie]

Moto phones are excellent value and generally sturdy. I find myself going further and further down market buying cheaper phones like Moto G because I haven't seen a flagship feature that looks really compelling in years. Unless foldables really take off (doubt it) my main concern is really just battery and the Moto G Power is the current king.

[lolinder]

My main problem with Moto is I've had really bad luck with their charging ports. I had a G4 and a G6, and both had ports that were loose from day 1 (so much so that car charging was impossible because it would instantly fall out) and both become unusable towards the end. I have several family members who had the same experience.

[mnw21cam]

I'll agree with Motorola, though pretty-much the first thing I did when I switched mine on was disable all the Moto app stuff. Once you have done that it does mostly stay completely out of your way, which is probably the closest you're going to get to a non-bloatware system.

One slight warning, and I'm not even sure if it's completely true, but my G8+ is only a few years old and it has slowed to an absolute crawl. My current understanding is that this is because the flash storage is running out of writes and slowing down. If true, it means they used a sub-standard part with an unacceptably short lifespan.