Their phones are really solid but they do lag on OS updates, and their cameras are never good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if there's an app that can do this now on any phone, but I hadn't thought to look until now.
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.
It's nearly like shaking and uses the gyros because there's no touch interface there.
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.