Even At $200, I Don’t Think You Should Buy The Motorola Moto G (2025)

I’ve probably reviewed more cheap Android devices over the last few years than anyone else here at Android Authority, so I’ve spent a lot of time exploring what works and what doesn’t work. When something works at this price tier, it tends to work remarkably well, like Motorola’s speedy wired charging or Samsung’s typically rock-solid primary cameras. However, when something doesn’t work, it sticks out like a sore thumb and drags down the rest of the experience. This feels like one of those times.

Even though there are plenty of things about the Motorola Moto G (2025) that I like, the glue that holds them together doesn’t feel quite set. The wired charging, light Android skin, and decent primary camera are all worth recommending separately, yet they don’t quite come together in a way that makes me want to keep using this budget phone. Here’s where I think the 2025 model of the Moto G goes wrong and, ultimately, why I don’t think you should buy it even if you’re after a ~$200 phone.

Looks are almost everything

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

Before you get the idea that I will just sit here and bash the Moto G (2025) from top to bottom, just know that isn’t the case. I like the overall design of Motorola’s most affordable 5G-ready device (Motorola dropped the 5G in the name this year, but it’s still a 5G phone), and I think it’s much better to hold and look at than the glossy, personality-free slabs that make up Samsung’s Galaxy A series right now. Sure, it’s mostly plastic, but Motorola has dressed it in such a way that I don’t seem to mind the cheap materials — nor do I feel like they take away from the finished product.

The main piece of Motorola’s budget-friendly design that deserves praise is its vegan leather back panel. Even though it’s essentially a nicely textured piece of plastic, the soft-touch finish makes it much easier to hold for long stretches, and it melds nicely into the plastic frame without a sharp angle like I’ve felt on other affordable devices. More importantly, no part of the Moto G (2025) picks up smudges, so I don’t have to spend a few seconds wiping it off after pulling it from my pocket. I also appreciate the raised camera bump, as I don’t accidentally smudge the cameras nearly as often as I did with the tiny cutouts on Samsung’s Galaxy A16 5G.

Motorola’s colorful vegan leather will always score better with me than Samsung’s glossy plastic.

But the part of Motorola’s design you’ll probably spend the most time looking at is its 6.7-inch LCD panel made of Gorilla Glass 3, which is mostly good news. I say mostly because the 120Hz refresh rate and improved brightness work strongly in Motorola’s favor, but other quirks like lower HD Plus resolution don’t stack up as well considering a lot of the competition is at the 1080p mark.

Although the resolution has proven sharp enough for light, cartoon-like games like Pokemon TCG Pocket, it’s been less impressive when trying to dip into the trailer for season two of Andor and keeping up with the action of a dozen Major League Soccer matches on opening weekend proved impossible. I could easily hear the commentators (and the space battles) from Motorola’s punchy stereo speakers, but tracking a tiny white ball around the display was harder than my usually sharp eyes were ready for. Other videos like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, where the subject is an individual talking directly to the camera, looked much better since the LCD didn’t have to render tiny details. Also, Motorola has rectified one of the biggest problems of its previous Moto G generation, the awful viewing angles. Even if I’m working my way around the kitchen, I find that I can easily glance at the Moto G (2025) to check for a cooking temperature or a measurement of an ingredient.

Other bits of the Moto G (2025) design feel like throwbacks to Android phones that you can’t get anymore — at least not at the flagship price point. It still has expandable storage via a microSD slot shared with the SIM tray and a headphone jack, which would be far more exciting if my cats hadn’t chewed through my last few pairs of wired earbuds. Unfortunately, Motorola also took a throwback approach to a few of its rear cameras, which we’ll revisit in a minute.

Perhaps the least important part of the Moto G (2025) design I like quite a lot is its color option. It only comes in a single Forest Gray finish here in the US, but it’s a clever shade that seems to swing from gray to green and back again, depending on the lighting. If you look at it in bright enough lighting, like direct sunlight, it almost takes on a midnight green shade reminiscent of a Philadelphia Eagles jersey, which is good news for anyone who damaged their phone while climbing a light pole following the end of Super Bowl LIX. I might also like to see Motorola offer its other light blue finish in the US, more for the variety than wanting another light blue phone.

Other finishing touches on the Moto G (2025) tell me that Motorola listens to some of our complaints from year to year, even if it’s not addressing the issues. For example, it finally brought NFC support for wireless payments to the entire range of Moto G devices a year ago, which was one of my biggest problems with the series for several years. However, the Moto G (2025) still only comes with a “water-repellent” design, which Motorola usually claims is about the same as IP52 protection. I’d like to see more on that front, especially with the Moto G Power 5G (2025) going so far beyond expectations by picking up IP68 and IP69 protection despite only selling for $100 more than the Moto G.

Help me, RAM Boost, you’re my only hope

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

Unfortunately, although I like the overall look of the Moto G (2025), they say that beauty is only skin deep. In this case, that fact becomes painfully true the more you try to push MediaTek’s Dimensity 6300 chipset (no, not the 6300 Plus, just the regular one) beyond the basics. The power-sipping 6nm processor comes backed by just 4GB of RAM and up to 128GB of onboard storage, and no part of the setup feels prepared to compete in 2025 unless you turn on RAM Boost and walk a fine line of how you use your storage.

Interestingly, though, that’s not the story our controlled benchmarks tell — at least, not entirely. As always, I loaded up our slate of CPU and GPU tests and set the Moto G (2025) to run its course before stacking it against a few of its siblings and some of its closest rivals. To my surprise, it largely kept pace. Sure, it came up a little short in the single-core Geekbench 6 performance, but then it jumped ahead of its predecessor and Samsung’s Galaxy A16 5G in the multi-core stage of the test.

Even more surprising is that the Moto G (2025) set the tone in our PCMark test, beating other recent Motorola launches, the Galaxy A16 5G, and even the CMF Phone 1, which had previously been a top budget performer. The Moto G handled our GPU-intensive stress test pretty well, too, maintaining nearly the same score across all 20 runs of the test and keeping pace with the Moto G Power (2025) which has the same chip, and the Galaxy A16 5G which has the Exynos 1330 in the US. It was a modest score, sure, but a consistent performance nonetheless, and a notable improvement over the 2024 Moto G 5G.

And yet, the problem with Motorola’s latest budget phone is that this level of decent performance doesn’t seem to carry over into daily life. Instead, whenever I switch between just about any pair of apps too quickly, the Moto G (2025) grinds to a halt. Something as simple as opening the camera app and flipping between shooting modes is enough to trip the Dimensity 6300 up for a minute or two at a time, which is enough to make me miss the three minutes each day that my cats sit comfortably together. Other simple experiences, like shuffling out a new hand in the copy of Solitaire that comes preinstalled as bloatware, slow down the Moto G, too, which is a surefire way to make me uninstall a game that I otherwise enjoy to kill time.

To me, though, the performance seems at its worst when I pick up the phone after not using it for a few minutes. If I reach for the notification shade and find that there’s anything in it, the shade itself seems to bog down the rest of the phone, showing me a mix of ads and a bloated 1Weather forecast for the next few hours. Once I clear them out, the Moto G seems to pick up a bit of speed, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a notification shade that makes life this difficult.

MediaTek’s Dimensity 6300 benchmarks well but struggles to keep up in daily life. RAM Boost is essential.

The one thing that could help to boost your performance should you pick up the Moto G, however, is called RAM Boost. I briefly mentioned it above, but it’s similar to what companies like OnePlus have previously offered. It essentially allows the phone to repurpose a bit of storage as RAM, giving apps more power to process. I currently have RAM Boost set so that it can use its maximum 8GB of storage, which has helped but hasn’t completely smoothed out my experience.

Considering the Moto G Power (2025) with the exact same chip, but with 8GB of RAM had far better multitasking results (though equally middling overall performance), it’s safe to say that the 4GB of RAM is the problem here. Unfortunately unlike the rival Galaxy A16 5G, for example, while you can get a higher storage model of the Moto G (2025), there are no higher RAM options — you’re stuck with that measly 4GB and the overreliance on RAM Boost.

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

I also don’t usually spend much time picking apart base Android experiences these days, but there are a few parts of Motorola’s Hello UX worth pointing out for better and worse. First, Motorola has purged those annoying shopping, entertainment, and gaming hubs that I spent the last two years complaining about. If you’ll remember, they initially looked like handy organizational folders on previous Motorola devices, only to spit out a ton of bloatware if you exited them incorrectly, so I’m glad they’re gone for good.

However, other bloat remains in the form of the terrible partnership with 1Weather, which slows down things as simple as weather forecasts to ad-laden crawls and the Glance experience on the lock screen. Thankfully, Glance doesn’t come active by default, but the Moto G (2025) has sent me several push notifications begging me to turn it on. I haven’t done so, and I recommend you do the same unless you want ads and news articles on your lock screen.

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

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But, while I’ve been less than impressed by a lot of my time with Motorola’s modest setup, one thing has stood out to me: The Moto G (2025)’s battery life. Simply put, the combination of a 5,000mAh battery and a power-sipping processor remains tough to beat. I set the budget phone up for our standard drain test, which covers several day-to-day scenarios, including web browsing, snapping photos with the camera, and a simulated Zoom meeting. I had decently high expectations going into the test, but the Moto G once again surprised me.

The stellar battery life holds in real life, too, as I’ve regularly gone two or more days between charges. MediaTek’s Dimensity 6300 chipset will not be overworked when you’re only asking it to tackle social media and a few light, card-style games to pass the time. Perhaps the only time that excellent battery life worked against me was while intentionally draining the cell to see how quickly I could then charge it again. I sat and ran benchmarks for what felt like hours because I couldn’t find anything else to drain the battery faster.

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

Eventually, though, I got there, and it was time for a charge with Motorola’s 30W wired charging. Honestly, for US-based buyers, TurboPower might be one of the best budget-friendly charging standards you can take advantage of. It’s faster than the 25W speeds Samsung supports on its Galaxy A16 5G, yet it doesn’t require as specific a charger, such as the SuperVOOC standard on affordable OnePlus devices.

The graph above shows that Motorola’s 30W speeds are no joke. Sure, the Moto G (2025) still takes about 15 minutes longer than Nothing’s CMF Phone 1 with its 33W speeds, but it saves you around 10 minutes when compared to the Galaxy A16 5G and nearly half an hour over the time the previous Moto G 5G (2024) demanded.

Unfortunately, there’s no wireless charging at this price point — which isn’t a huge surprise — but there’s also no charger included in the Moto G’s ever-shrinking packaging. If you’re coming from an older Motorola device or a budget-friendly Samsung phone, you might have to pick up a new charger to ensure you can reach the full 30W speeds. Thankfully, we’ve spent enough time charging Android phones at all price points that we’ve picked out a few favorites along the way.

Motorola’s main camera is better, but it’s not enough

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

Flipping the Moto G (2025) over, you might be excited to see that it looks like Motorola has added another camera to its corner-mounted bump. Well, that’s only partly true. Yes, there are now three sensors embedded in the sheet of gray-green leather, but you won’t get too much use out of the new addition because it’s a depth sensor. Yes, Motorola has brought back a 2MP depth sensor just a year after trimming it from the Moto G 5G (2024).

Outside of the lowly depth sensor, the rest of the Moto G’s setup is about the same as I remember from its predecessor. It packs a 50MP wide camera that does almost all of the heavy lifting, and it’s backed by a 2MP dedicated macro sensor for the rare occasion when you want to capture the finest details. Unsurprisingly, the combination means that about 95% of the time, it feels like I only have one camera to work with. Motorola’s high-resolution sensor resorts to digital zoom from the second you start to pinch in, and it tops out at just 8x zoom, which is shorter than most other cheap Android camera phones. The results also fall off quickly in less-than-perfect lighting, so let’s get to some camera samples.

At first, getting a good read on the Moto G’s primary camera was tough. Sometimes, it would bring back something pretty good, like the framing on the 2x zoom shot down the dock or the warm, late afternoon color profile of the life ring framed against the harbor. I quite like both shots, even though I wish that the shot of the dock took on the warmer tones of the other shot.

But, for every pair of photos I liked, I got just as many results like the low-light ice sculpture to the far right. Even though the Moto G supports a version of night mode, it’s incredibly slow, meaning you have to hold perfectly still if you have any hopes of making out your subject. I shot and reshot that same ice sculpture from my hometown nearly half a dozen times before I managed to hold still enough, which isn’t ideal when everyone in town is trying to capture the same scenes.

Once again, the Moto G (2025) has a mixed bag of color profiles for me to dig into. Of the three, I like the one in the middle the best — offering a much punchier profile to match the bright sunlight of a late February morning. It did somewhat forget about the key piece of portrait mode — the artificial bokeh — but I prefer the clear look at Baltimore’s Washington Monument in the background. The Moto G also grabbed impressive detail from the shot of Professor Trash Wheel, another Baltimore icon, but the orange buoys guiding the trash towards the conveyor belt seem just a bit too punchy, almost Samsung-like.

As mentioned above, there’s no telephoto support on the Moto G (2025), so everything from 1x to 8x comes straight from the primary sensor. At first, that’s not so bad — I like most of the shots I grabbed from 1x and 2x zoom, but the results get worse as you punch closer. There’s a significant color shift from the 2x zoom shot to 4x, and the viewfinder becomes much harder to trust. Thankfully, it’s still okay for large, stationary subjects like George Washington above, but I tried to capture a pair of spring doves on top of a bar sign on a walk for coffee and found that they mostly looked like small brown lumps. Unfortunately, the Moto G had similar trouble pulling details from the brick wall behind the doves without oversharpening the final image.

And then, we have the macro camera. Usually, I would love to tell you that I grabbed several shots from Motorola’s other usable camera and had to work my way down to just a few, but that’s not the case. Instead, I had to remind myself to use it, looking for tiny details like a close-up of an ice sculpture or a purple plant I passed while jogging. Frankly, the results are fine — there’s some good detail in the cracked ice and the wooden bench in the middle — but the 2MP resolution will start to show if you look at these images on a larger screen, and I can’t see anyone buying a $200 phone for its macro sensor. I’d much rather see Motorola swap to an ultrawide sensor, even one with a modest 5MP resolution.

The Motorola Moto G (2025) probably won’t be a go-to for video shooters on a budget, either. Sure, the 50MP primary camera will do in a pinch, but it tops out with 1080p video at 30fps, and the macro camera only supports HD recording at 30fps — not an impressive pairing, but what we’ve come to expect at this price point. The stabilization from the former is fine, but I can’t imagine trying to follow a subject, even a tiny one like a spider, with a 2MP macro sensor.

I like parts of the Moto G (2025), but not the finished experience

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

There’s an awful lot that I should like about Motorola’s latest Moto G. I should be pleased that it offers solid 30W wired charging, its 50MP primary camera has improved over last year, and Motorola continues to find ways to make its budget-friendly lineup look and feel better than its competition from Samsung. Even the Dimensity 6300 processor should impress me, as it can hang with other chipsets at the ever-tricky $200 price point.

However, outside of those few standout features, I think many parts of the Moto G (2025) fail to come together in a reliable way. Even though Motorola took the unexpected step to add a third camera sensor to the back of its rock-bottom device, it chose a lowly 2MP depth sensor that doesn’t add much to the setup. On top of that, the dedicated 2MP macro sensor is almost too highly specialized for me to use unless I’m specifically trying to show off that it exists. Likewise, that processor upgrade is hamstrung by a limited amount of RAM.

The Moto G (2025) stumbles under its own weight too often for me to recommend buying one, especially when your factor in the limited update policy.

The real problem is that the Motorola Moto G (2025) will get left behind. I think it lags badly enough in day-to-day life that people who buy it will ultimately end up frustrated and looking for something else. During my weeks with the phone, I’ve missed more camera shots than I can count, I’ve had my notification shade slowed to a crawl by ads for a service that I’m not going to use, and I’ve had apps quit on themselves simply because RAM Boost hasn’t kicked in yet. Eventually, the Moto G (2025) kicks into gear and runs a little smoother, but I’d hate to see it struggle in the face of an emergency.

Also, whether Motorola likes it or not, other cheap Android phones keep improving. Even though I much prefer the design of the Moto G (2025) to something like Samsung’s Galaxy A16 5G ($199.99 at Samsung), it’s much easier to recommend the latter for one main reason: Android updates. Samsung’s $200 phone is in line for six years of major version updates, meaning it will stay current and supported until the start of the next decade. On the other hand, the Moto G (2025) is only set for two major version updates and a third year of security patches, which will cover it until Android 17 arrives next year. That’s an improvement of a year each compared to the previous generation Moto G, but there’s also no telling how quickly Motorola will adopt its major software updates, so you could find yourself waiting much longer for software that could ultimately be outdated.

If you’re outside of the US or can live with network compatibility weirdness, Nothing’s CMF Phone 1 ($289 at Amazon) is worth a look, too. It offers interchangeable accessories like colorful back panels, a kickstand, and a cardholder to make your phone a little more unique. On top of that, it packs a pair of more reliable cameras, the best performance you can get for $200, and a much lighter, more stylish Android skin that skips the bloatware I’ve so often complained about from Motorola,

Just as confusing is that Motorola will sell you a much better phone for just $100 more. Its Moto G Power 5G (2025) ($299.99 at Amazon) addresses several of my key sticking points, like official IP68 and IP69 ratings, the addition of 15W wireless charging, double the base RAM without needing RAM Boost, and an 8MP ultrawide sensor in place of the dedicated macro. Everything about it suggests that your money will go much further, and you can always wait for one of Motorola’s frequent sales to make the price a little more reasonable.

Motorola Moto G (2025)

Vegan leather back • Speedy wired charging • 120Hz refresh rate

MSRP: $199.99

The Moto G (2025) adds plenty of new wrinkles while staying comfortably at $199

Motorola continues to offer large and reliable Android Phones on a budget. The Moto G (2025) has a 6.7-inch 120Hz display, 50MP camera, 12GB of RAM, a big 5,000mAh battery, and a microSD card slot for expanded storage.

Positives

• Eye-catching design
• Decent primary camera
• Solid wired charging
• Fluid 120Hz display

Cons

• Poor day-to-day performance
• Bad peripheral cameras
• Wishy-washy water resistance
• Limited software support