[alkimie2]

As a pretty happy galaxy nexus owner (that I just passed to my teenaged son), I've been pretty disappointed with the price point and apparent lack of commitment to the google phone line. As a consequence I've just bought OnePlus Ones for myself and my family based on their apparent commitment to cyanogen as native-from-the-factory load and a much better price point than the Google 6. It's a bit sad to see Google move away from the Nexus phones as a touchstone for value and 'pure' android, but good to see others (e.g., OnePlus) filling the ecological niche.

It will be interesting to see if OnePlus continues to fill this niche or evolves away from it.

[aselzer]

Sadly it looks like OnePlus is moving away from Cyanogenmod (search Google News for `oneplus cyanogen`). Also the OnePlus One never had the fully open source version of Cyanogenmod 11. It uses a version called 11s (https://cyngn.com/products/oneplusone/) with many proprietary features.

However, they will surely continue making phones at that price on which the pure version of Cyanogenmod can be installed.

Xiaomi seems very promising since they also make phones at that price point with similar specs, and Cyanogenmod ROMs are in development. I know it might be hard to get them in the US, but in Europe they can even be ordered from Amazon.

[saurik]

> Sadly it looks like OnePlus is moving away from Cyanogenmod (search Google News for `oneplus cyanogen`).

Having done the search you recommended, it sounds like the story is best told in the other direction: CyangenMod signed an exclusive deal with one of OnePlus's competitors for the Indian market, totally screwing them over in India, making them forced to release their device there without CyanogenMod. If they are also now dropping support for Cyanogen everywhere due to this (which isn't clear), I honestly could not blame them: a better telling of the story is "sadly it looks like CyanogenMod is moving away from OnePlus".

[aselzer]

I didn't mean to imply that OnePlus was the one to blame. Cyanogen, inc. did not act in a fair way while selling something that was mainly a success due to an open source community.

OnePlus (or Micromax) actually very recently announced a replacement for Cyanogenmod 11S: https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/rom-official-5-0-android-...

I somehow still don't understand how they will be able to include Google Apps without being a member of the Open Handset Alliance when shipping an almost exact fork of Android.(http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...)

[shekhar101]

Moto is doing a fine job with this. Guaranteed next update and pure Android experience. All this even on cheaper phones. I am also a part of their 'Soak Test' program. Got to say, they are doing a really good job!

[jsnell]

The Moto G is roughly as useful as a brick at this point. Some update they pushed last summer broke the memory management, such that apps would be randomly killed and immediately restarted even with relatively huge amounts of free memory. This is a very widespread issue with hundreds of complaints on Motorola's support forum, and it's just not getting fixed.

So no. Motorola are not doing a fine job with this. Just a shame that they're still able to coast by on the good reviews, from before they broke the otherwise excellent phone.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Yes. This is very annoying. Apparently this is fixed in 5.0.1 according to the few Gen2 Moto G users who got the Lollipop update. Hopefully it will deployed to everyone else sometime this month.

It would seem that the problem is due to overly aggressive memory management that was never properly adjusted for 1GiB RAM. One would hope that the popularity of the G and other small memory Android devices would help push for more efficient memory usage rather than requiring 2GiB+ for a decent experience. For starters, it would be nice if more of the core system was implemented in native code (ART doesn't count).