The Moto X4 won’t get Android Preview Releases, and is therefore useless for developers.
I’m a student, but I also develop apps. Even with the emulator, there are still bugs you can only find on real devices.
So now every time a new Android version comes out, I’ll either end up with a month where my apps are broken and I’m slowly working on fixing them (so ~10% of the time the app is unusable), or I have to shell out north of $900 just to get the cheapest still supported Pixel in Germany.
Additionally, my largest concern with no mid-range device supporting preview releases is that the mid-range phone experience is going to decline rapidly (slow downs, resource bloat) until the only viable equivalent experience to what we have now is on a $1000+ phone. When phones were sub $500, I could get a new one every two years pretty reasonably. Or if I didn't like my phone, it wasn't a huge hit to upgrade early. But now I'm paying more than 2x what I paid when I started using Android phones. At that price point, Apple starts to look real good.
I’m a student, but I also develop apps. Even with the emulator, there are still bugs you can only find on real devices.
So now every time a new Android version comes out, I’ll either end up with a month where my apps are broken and I’m slowly working on fixing them (so ~10% of the time the app is unusable), or I have to shell out north of $900 just to get the cheapest still supported Pixel in Germany.