rewrite this title The latest Moto G gets rid of a lot of bloatware, and I love it

While I usually like what Motorola does with its budget-friendly Moto G series, I’ve had one main problem over the last few years: Bloatware. It’s managed to find its way into most corners of Hello UX, from ads disguised as folders to weather partnerships that make finding a daily forecast a chore. And, unless you’re careful to opt out of Motorola’s recommendations during the setup process, you have to go through your app drawer to pick out and purge as many as half a dozen apps.

It reached a point where I wasn’t sure when the bloatware would stop the next time I picked up a cheap Motorola device. Then, the Moto G 5G (2025) and Moto G Power 5G (2025) showed up, and I held my breath through the entire setup process. And then, I realized that Motorola didn’t have much more to shove my way — it had backed off from its mountain of bloatware, and Hello UX started to feel lighter again. Here’s what changed.

It wasn’t hard to find my least favorite part of Motorola’s previous budget offerings: The shopping, gaming, and entertainment hubs. Although they looked like simple folders at first, they were carefully disguised ways to load your phone up with apps you almost certainly didn’t want. It was easy to think that they’d be clever, automatically organized hubs that would populate whenever you downloaded a new game or streaming service, but they worked in the opposite way. You’d open one, see a pre-checked list of apps, and press the Done button to exit, only for Motorola to take that as its cue to download that entire list and force you to delete the apps later.

Now, with the latest Moto G phones, they’re gone. The hubs are no more, and I feel like Dorothy in that scene from The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch of the East gets squished by a house. I’m expecting singing and dancing because I can finally set up a cheap Android phone without feeling like it wants to pull a fast one on me. And yes, I know that technically, you could opt out of the hubs during the setup process, but I missed that step the first few times I set up a Moto G device, so it’s easy to see how others might do the same.

Unfortunately, there are still a few bloatware apps that you can’t dodge on the Moto G 5G (2025), so I can only give Motorola partial credit. I thought I’d avoided the lot when it gave me a checklist of apps from Google as well as social media picks like TikTok, and I could opt out of the latter, only to find that others like Chime, Block Blast, and an ad-riddled version of Solitaire were slightly less optional. I’ve since been able to uninstall them, but I won’t pretend to know why some of Motorola’s bloat is optional while the rest isn’t.

Honestly, I never thought I’d get a budget-friendly Motorola phone without any bloatware — it’s to be expected when keeping the price low. However, now that Hello UX is taking steps to get lighter and smoother, I have one request for the next thing to go: It’s time for Motorola to end its partnership with 1Weather. If the sneaky hubs are my least favorite part of reviewing otherwise solid, cheap Android phones, the bloated, ad-filled forecasting experience is right on its tail.

From the second you open 1Weather, it starts to struggle. It gives you the current temperature and the feels-like forecast for the moment and then loads up with a cycle of ads that slows the whole process down. Then, when you start to scroll down, you can usually make it past about one section of the forecast — be it hourly projections, a radar, or an air quality alert — before you get a double-whammy of more ads and something called 1Weather Shorts, which are news articles that take you to an external site. Oh, and if you try to jump from the bottom of 1Weather to the top, the Moto G 5G (2025) drops frames, leaving you with what feels like a slow-motion recap of everything you just saw.

Perhaps the only good news about 1Weather is that it’s entirely optional, and Motorola doesn’t try to hide it as something it’s not. You can’t get out of it during the setup process, but you can uninstall it almost immediately after. When you do, your Moto G 5G (2025) will revert to its default AccuWeather interface, which is much faster, more responsive, and, more importantly, ad-free.

But, when praising a budget phone, sometimes small steps are the most important. Motorola could have easily packed its latest Moto G 5G with more bloatware rather than stripped some out, so I’ll take the wins where I can get them on an otherwise modest $200 phone.