Motorola announces Oreo updates: Moto Z and Moto G5 lines, starting this fall [Update: Moto G4 Plus, too]

Update, September 18: Motorola has updated its initial blog post to reflect a change in its plan after an outpouring of frustration and anger around the lack of a promised update for the Moto G4 Plus. From the company's blog:

Since the time of posting this, we have learned of some errors in our marketing materials around Android O upgrades for moto g4 Plus. It's our general practice for the moto g family to get one major OS upgrade per device, so it wasn't originally planned for Android O. But it's important to us we keep our promises, so in addition to the N upgrade it has already received, we will be upgrading moto g4 Plus to Android O. Because this is an unplanned upgrade, it will take some time to fit into our schedule, we'll update our software upgrade page when we have more info.

So there you have it. The Moto G4 Plus was never meant to get Oreo, but Motorola is doing us a solid by eventually upgrading it. Thanks‽

The original piece is below.

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Motorola has had a ... mixed history with software updates. On one hand it's often been super-quick to get the latest version of Android out to some phones, and on the other it has abandoned lower-end phones far sooner than expected. Today, it announced which of its phones will get the update to Android 8.0 Oreo.

Starting "this fall," Motorola will roll out the Oreo update to:

• Moto Z
• Moto Z Droid
• Moto Z Force Droid
• Moto Z Play
• Moto Z Play Droid
• Moto Z2 Play
• Moto Z2 Force
• Moto X4
• Moto G5
• Moto G5 Plus
• Moto G5S
• Moto G5S Plus

Aside from reaffirming just how ridiculous the naming convention is for Motorola's phones, a few things stand out. First, it's great to see that the flagship Moto Z line, now over a year old, is definitely making the jump to Oreo. Also, it's not surprising to see the latest phones in the Moto G lineup also making the jump — but hey, sometimes you never know with Motorola.

Then there are a couple notable omissions here: what about the Moto E4 series, which launched this year? Sure phones like the Moto E4 retail for just $129, and are already on sale well under that mark, but it's a phone that launched in June 2017 and it isn't confirmed for an Oreo update. And how about last year's Moto G4 lineup — perhaps not every model, but maybe the high-end Moto G4 Plus, at least? Nothing confirmed right now.

That's not to say that Motorola couldn't roll out those updates later, perhaps in the first few months of 2018 as so many other manufacturers will, but this isn't necessarily giving us tons of confidence that it'll happen.