I don't know, my first "smart" phone was a Motorola Atrix 4G. You know, that one with (one of) the first fingerprint scanner and that thingy that allowed you to dock it to something like a laptop and thus you'd have a working laptop thingy.
Its wifi/bt card broke exactly one year after I bought it. It worked exactly for 365 days. That was 100% hardware failure and planned obsolescence.
Needless to say never bought not even looked at anything Motorola ever since.
There is no singular Motorola. The company has been spinning off different parts of itself for quite a long time.
In 2011/2012, it was divided into different parts. The biggest were Motorola Solutions (mostly focused 2-way radios and related communications infrastructure; stuff commonly used by public safety entities) and Motorola Mobility (mostly cell phones and related stuff).
Google bought Motorola Mobility. It has been said that this was because Google wanted their patent portfolio. In 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo: The same Lenovo that makes ThinkPads is also who makes Motorola phones today.
Somewhere along the line, their name also got licensed out for home networking bits. That appears to be the products that the Mashable article writes about. This history is murkier, but it appears that some combination of Premier LogiTech and Boundless Devices (whoever tf these companies are) is responsible for making the Motorola-branded routers in question.
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tl;dr, the Motorola that makes the radios that cops carry on their hip, the Motorola that makes Android phones that consumers carry in their pocket, and the Motorola that makes home routers are not the same company. Like -- at all.
Conflating them is easy because it is, frankly, a confusing mess.
But still: The shitty software on a Motorola phone is not cut from the same cloth as the shitty software on a Motorola router. They're products of very different companies that share nothing but a common trademark.
Ah yes, just like that time Kodak licensed their name out to make checks... air purifiers? (Bonus points: their brand licensee on most of that crap is now out of business.)
Sorta. It's both different and harder to track than that.
Kodak is in bad shape. They were exquisitely focused on cradle-to-grave film products: Ideally, a person used Kodak cameras that were loaded with Kodak film that was processed with Kodak chemicals on Kodak machines before being printed on Kodak paper using more Kodak machines and chemicals, and all of this but the picture-taking happened within Kodak facilities.
They had their finger on this market for a very long time. But ship that once delivered their bread and butter has sank, and nobody is going to build a new one (not for Kodak, nor for anyone else -- some folks still shoot on film and will continue to do so for as long as it is possible, but it's never "coming back").
Meanwhile, Motorola Solutions (stock ticker MSI) is alive and well. They're still based in Illinois, and they're still doing good work in the 2-way radio space and -- most importantly -- selling radios and back-end gear. They're not in the consumer products game anymore, but it's perfectly OK to make money selling expensive stuff to businesses and governments. (That's a pretty common position; it just happens to be one that isn't particularly visible.)
The situation with Motorola-branded routers is closer to that of General Electric, I suppose: GE licensed/sold their consumer-goods division a long time ago; the GE-branded products on the shelf at the store are, at present, products of Haier. But portions of the old GE still produce things like jet engines and power-generation turbines -- big, expensive stuff for solving big, expensive problems.
As mentioned in the article, they are products of Premier LogiTech, LLC, who have licensed the Motorola brand name.