KitKat on the Moto X was peak Android
I've changed a lot over the years. As a teenager and into my early adulthood, I was the stereotypical techie with a bent towards free software. I went to school for Computer Science, and my dream was to work for Google. I wanted the latest smartphone and features. I followed advancements almost religiously.
A lot of that has changed. I now distrust Google completely for a myriad of reasons, and I don't really care as much about hardware. I'm perfectly happy with using my Pixel 7a with GrapheneOS. It's a major Android version behind what Google has released (because they stopped playing nice) and lacks all of the proprietary features that kinda make a Pixel worth buying. However, my main concerns now are privacy, security, data portability, and living simply.
This isn't about today though. This is about when I was following the latest advancements in Android. Let's go back to 2013. Google a couple years prior had made a huge jump in their aesthetic for smartphones from 2.3 Gingerbread to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with their Holo design language. They had used 4.1-4.3 Jelly Bean to speed up Android with things like Project Butter and added a lot of useful features with Google Now. 4.4 KitKat was the ultimate refinement of all of this before the UI refresh with Material Design in 5.0 Lollipop. It swapped out the cyan colorscheme for white to make the UI a bit more subdued. It was a lot of polish and optimization with Project Svelte. I also feel like KitKat was at a time in Google's history where they were still introducing more products than killing them. By 2013, Google was really known for killing Reader. Now, Google has a reputation of killing pretty much anything that's not Search, Drive, Maps, or YouTube.
The Moto X was the first handset released by Motorola fully designed after their change in ownership to Google. It is Google's first foray into making their own phones before the Pixels. It was a mid-range device with modest specs, but it had a specialized processor devoted to being able to interpret voice commands and introduced an always on display for notifications (common features nowadays). This was also the departure of Motoblur from Motorola's devices and a shift to a close-to-AOSP OS with just a few tweaks to better the experience like twisting the phone to launch the camera and the other aforementioned features. The Moto X was also a smaller device with a modest 720p display instead of the standard 1080p. It shipped with Android 4.2 but got KitKat right away, even beating Google's Nexus 4.
The Moto X has a special place in my heart because it's the first smartphone I bought myself. Every phone before that had been purchased by my parents or been a loaner from a friend that got new devices regularly as an app developer. I specifically got the Moto X Developer Edition because it had an unlockable bootloader because this was the season of my life where I didn't understand that custom ROMs were a huge security vulnerability. My Moto X had that sweet panda/stormtrooper look with the white back and black front. There was also just something about the design of the bezel that made using it incredibly satisfying to me. The device was polycarbonate (aka plastic), but it felt solid in the hand and was a joy to use. That combined with the new features of KitKat made it a wonderful device. This was also when I trusted Google and was all in. As one of the few devices shipping vanilla Android, this was the "Nexus phone" for Verizon customers. I have fond memories of using Google Play Music (being able to upload my library was amazing!), chatting with friends on Hangouts, and reading books with Play Books, which looked great. Stock was polished enough and got updates so quick that I didn't feel the need to unlock the bootloader for a while unlike other devices at the time (my device before this was a Galaxy S4 running CyanogenMod).
I think the Moto X is my favorite phone I've had to date with the Nexus 6P as a close second. Part of the nostalgia is also due to how new smartphones still were in 2013. Every phone had novel features and were pushing the envelope for what we could do with the supercomputers in our pockets. This post isn't really anything more than me just reminiscing on those times.