You could be forgiven for forgetting about Motorola’s folding phones in light of new shiny ones announced by the likes of Samsung, but someone at the company must care about them — a new OS update has been released for the 2019 Razr, bringing it from Android 10, to Android 11 (via Droid-Life). Yes, that’s correct — the OS that started hitting Pixels in September of 2020 is the one that became available for the Razr today.
Note: The original Razr reboot and the Razr 5G both became available in 2020. However, the first one was announced in 2019, so I’ll refer to it as the 2019 Razr to help avoid confusion between it and the Razr 5G.
While it may seem like the update for the 2019 Razr is woefully late, consider this: according to a report from Android Police and Motorola’s updates page, Android 11 started rolling out to the much better 2020 Razr 5G sometime between April and July. For how first-gen the 2019 Razr is, getting the update only a few months after its successor isn’t too shabby (despite the fact that getting it almost a year after it started rolling out is pretty rough, on an absolute timescale).
Motorola’s update issues aren’t limited to its foldables, however. Many of its recent phones only come with the promise of two years of security updates, with some higher-end ones getting one major OS update. Given that the Razr already got an upgrade to Android 10 (in May of 2020), today’s update puts it at two feature updates, which is better than what Motorola promises for some of its non-folding phones. And it should be, given that the phones Motorola promises two years of security updates for cost between $160 and $400 — the 2019 Razr was $1,500 at launch. (Though that isn’t to say that a $400 phone should only get two years of updates.)
Still, if you’re still rockin’ an original Razr reboot, it’s an update you didn’t have before. You can read our full rundown of what Android 11 adds here, but the summary is that it brings chat app bubbles, more granular privacy permissions, and a more feature-packed power menu. Just do yourself a favor and don’t look too much at the features that are getting ready to drop with Android 12, because it’s hard to imagine that it’ll come to the older Razr anytime soon, if at all.
