The Motorola Moto G Stylus is no longer teeming with bloatware

The 2026 edition of Motorola’s stylus phone is plenty appealing.

My review unit is a charming lilac color, has a pleasantly textured back panel, and includes a MicroSD slot and what might be the last surviving headphone jack on a mainstream phone sold in North America. The namesake stylus is no longer just a fancy plastic stick, it’s active and comes with some neat tricks.

Even the bloatware problem has been reined in. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still present. But the unwanted apps have been scaled back to a manageable level compared to a couple of years ago. There’s just one pre-downloaded app “folder” that’s actually an app rather than three. The full page MotoHub widget, which was a privacy nightmare, is gone. The third-party weather app is now clearly identified as “developed by OneLouder Apps” on the initial splash page — something I complained about in my last Stylus review in 2023. If an app is going to ask to track your location constantly, you should at least be able to understand who made it without doing 10 minutes of googling.

The fact that bloatware is no longer my top concern with the G Stylus is a major improvement. But the phone comes with a higher price tag this year: $499, a full $100 price increase year over year. I’m sure the memory crisis has something to do with that. But it puts the Stylus squarely in the midrange, and I’m not convinced that it performs like a midrange phone should.

I don’t want to sell the G Stylus short. The active stylus is lovely to use, and there’s nothing quite like it in any other budget or midrange phone. It’s pressure sensitive, does a reasonably good job of handwriting recognition, and you can even configure it to magnify text when you hover over it. I have a feeling that’s a feature I’m going to really appreciate in a few years.

The notes app comes with the option to organize your notes into collections, which makes it feel less like a dumping ground and more like a tidy home for all the random stuff I stumble on and want to remember. The stylus is thoughtfully developed and integrated, and I think it even rivals the much pricier Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s stylus experience.

But the Moto G Stylus stumbles on a couple of basics, one being photos. The main camera is fine; it’s a 50-megapixel sensor with an optically stabilized lens. It does a good enough job in daylight, although colors are very punchy and red-channel clipping can cause some unpleasant color shifts. It gives a certain artificial look to photos. The ultrawide is fine, and it doubles as a macro camera so it provides autofocus for close-up shots. That means you get shots you might actually want to use compared to the days of the crappy 5-megapixel dedicated macro camera.

Here’s the thing: there are four camera lens-looking things on the back of the phone, one of which houses the flash. There are only two rear cameras available in the camera app. What gives? The spec sheet claims the last one is a “3-in-1 light sensor.” Motorola spokesperson Brendan Hall says it “helps with Auto White Balance, Exposure, and Anti-Flicker.” Which, I guess. But no doubt at least part of its job is to look like a real, third camera lens, and that feels like kind of a cheap trick.

The Moto G Stylus offers robust water and dust resistance: both IP68 and IP69, so it can stand up to water immersion and high pressure spray. This is excellent news. But software support doesn’t look as good: only two major OS upgrades and three years of security updates offered, and Motorola has a reputation for delivering those pretty slowly.

The Stylus 2026’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chipset coupled with 8GB of RAM feels like just enough power for this device. I noticed very slight hesitations here and there, particularly after waking it and opening a new app. Granted, I’ve been using flagship phones for most of the last year, but it’s been a long time since I’ve consciously noticed any kind of lag running my day-t0-day apps. It’s not enough to be a real concern today, but this is also the fastest the phone is ever going to run. It’ll hold up for its two scheduled annual OS upgrades, but I do worry about it slowing down after that.

I appreciate the Moto G Stylus. I love that it offers something truly different from the competition — the active stylus, a sense of style, not to mention the headphone jack and microSD slot. There’s bloatware, but not as bad as before. I just wish the cameras were a little better and it came with more software updates so I could recommend it as easily as the undefeated midrange champ: the Google Pixel 10A.

At a significant discount, the Moto G Stylus becomes a more interesting value proposition. Prior to RAMageddon, I would have said Motorola was sure to offer some good discounts on it before too long. Now I’m not so sure. Bottom line, if you want to hold onto your phone as long as possible and you take a lot of photos, you should stick with the Pixel.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge