Why is the Moto X so close to "stock" Android?

ultravisitor

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There's a pretty good interview at Gizmodo today with Rick Osterloh, SVP of Product at Motorola Mobility.

GIZ: In terms of the way you adapt the OS to your own phones, it's certainly a lot closer to stock Android than we see from most manufactures. What's the thinking behind that?

RO: Well, there are several things. So first off we think Android's evolved to a great place, a great user experience. And we just believe that it's a better user experience to go to the core essence of Android, and give that to the user. It also has some enormous benefits, like what users have just seen, which is that we can upgrade our phones to the latest version of Android much faster. And that's a core part of our strategy: We want to make sure that users get fast upgrades. And so we were the first to offer a KitKat upgrade on our phones through a carrier, and we did that through Verizon on the MotoX, which was, we thought, pretty cool for our end users. And we're gonna keep doing that, keep pursuing that strategy.

It's also the case that you see our phones have sort of outsized performance with the core specifications. User experience is really fast, you get great battery life out of these, and that's frankly because we're not introducing layers of software that we don't think are necessary, like our competitors are. So that's why we're pursuing this strategy. We add things where we think it can enhance the Google experience, like Touchless Control & Active Display, and in other places we try to stick to the core tenets of Android.

The entire interview is, again, at Gizmodo. It's definitely worth a read.
 

ultravisitor

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TechnoBuffalo has also posted an interview with Motorola’s head of global software engineering Steve Horowitz, and Steve Sinclair, vice president of product marketing.

Interview: Moto Execs Discuss Future of Moto X, Project Ara and More

A really interesting tidbit from that interview, especially given all the talk from others about how the Moto X is supposedly a "disappointment" in terms of sales:

Did Moto Maker sales meet expectations?

“We were surprised when people bought a Moto X and chose to use the Moto Maker — sales were about double what we expected,” Sinclair said.
 

ultravisitor

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Another interview today. This time it's at Droid-Life.com.

From the interview:

Then things got interesting for a moment when Moss asked me a question, basically giving me the power to tell them what they can do better. He wanted to know what it would take to get their product into my pocket as a daily driver, since I showed up to the interview with a G2 and Nexus 5 (Whoops!).

Question (from Moss): You have a couple of different devices out here (on the table). Where do you see where we are at now? When you look at our devices and how they fit into the competitive environment – as somebody who follows Android closely – where are we good and not good? What would it take so that you are carrying our devices around as a primary device?

Me: I basically told them to do more of the same, but that some people do still care about specs as much as the Moto X helped slow down the spec wars. I also told them that we focus a lot on cameras these days because the camera on your phone often times is all you have and it needs to be awesome. It’s the little things that make a smartphone great, since almost all smartphones are good these days. And last, I told them that the Moto X (with Bamboo) is actually my daily phone, but that I was using the G2 in its place for the extra battery life while hotspotting during CES. They joked about me being one of the few that are buying Bamboo.

They discuss other things, too, such as Project Ara, Moto G, and price points.
 

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