Motorola still sells great phones. Android doesn't have high system requirements and computing power has dramatically increased, become cheaper, and more energy efficient in the past few years, it's not too difficult to build a long-lasting and great phones anymore, which is bad for phone manufacturers because they rely on people purchasing phones frequently.

Even though I'm very tempted to purchase a Moto G or E I can't help but to stick to the Nexus phones though. If HTC or Motorola would just sell phones without custom software and pre-installed applications and would have a 3 year update policy, only then would I purchase from them.

I have no problems installing custom ROMs to keep a phone up-to-date but I really shouldn't have to.

While this isn't a guarantee that you'll get updates, you can definitely get a moto g (and a pile of other phones) without any carrier customization now as a "play edition" phone[1].

[1] https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Moto_G_Google_...

It's great to see Google doing these Play editions, I didn't realize that it was available for so many devices. https://play.google.com/store/devices/collection/promotion_5...

I'm going to get a Moto G, I was considering it a few days ago even though I don't really need a new phone (Nexus 4 has been dropped, thrown, and ran over a few times, put a screen protector on to hold the glass in place).

> Moto G or E I can't help but to stick to the Nexus phones though.

Moto G I believe is pretty minimal. There are a few "Motorola" apps. But dialer, calender almost everything else is vanilla Google Android