After Motorola rolled out a soak test for Android 6.0 for their Moto G2 in India and Brazil last month, they are now moving forward with the full release of the new OS version. Reports indicate that they have already started pushing the update to devices in India, and users are already getting the new major Android version over the air.
As usual with Android, it will take a while for everyone to get the update on their own device. The releases usually happen in waves, targeting separate groups of users until a full market coverage has been achieved. Because of this, users are advised to keep checking for new updates in their system settings. If an update is not available immediately, it usually just means that it will arrive at a later point, it’s typically not indicative of any issues.
The initial soak test was reportedly very successful, with no major issues reported by the users who got it. Some were expecting Motorola to delay the actual release a bit longer, as there were rumors that the company has some development issues behind the scenes, but it looks like either those rumors were false or the issues were worked out in time for the release.
The whole purpose of soak testing is exactly to figure out if there are any “showstopper” issues before pushing out the update to everybody, and testing it live on a small set of device owners has proved very effective in the past. Many manufacturers have similar strategies in place right now, and according to experts, this has definitely had a positive impact on the average quality of major OS releases when it’s applied correctly.
Users who install the new update can expect to get the full range of features that it brings to the table, such as Doze mode and Google Now on Tap. From what we’ve been able to gather, the performance of the OS has been quite good on the Moto G2 as well, even allegedly surpassing that of some other Android devices with similar specifications.
In addition, reports indicate that Motorola have been deprecating some of their own custom Android features in favor of stock implementations. For example, Moto Assist is no longer available and is now replaced by the original Do Not Disturb mode from Android itself.
This has been a positive sign for some fans of the company who are against bloatware and manufacturer customizations on Android, and this has been a hot topic in the community of the operating system’s fans for some time now. Due to the open source nature of Android, all manufacturers are practically free to do whatever they feel like with the system, and in some cases we’ve seen companies taking this to the extreme with some in-depth modifications that significantly alter the core experience.
While these changes sometimes work quite well, users are not always so happy about them, claiming that they sometimes drag down the operating system and make it less responsive. Some even prefer to use custom ROMs instead of the stock images available for their devices.
Thankfully, Motorola have never been particularly notorious for doing that, and as we can currently see, they are also open to the idea of doing away with their own implementations of certain features when the Android team develops something that works in a similar way. We don’t expect them to completely throw out their OS branding of course, but this is still a good start.