I’ve had a Moto X4 phone since November of 2018 (I bought it new from Google Fi) and recently the power button started failing intermittently.   Reading forums on the internet, having power buttons fail on phones is now a “thing”. Apparently phone manufacturers are cheeping out on the physical buttons to save money? Seems like a bad part to have fail.

[In all fairness, I play a lot of Pokemon Go, which involves turning on my phone, checking for Pokemon, and turning off my phone, so I probably hit the power button about 2x-4x more frequently than an “average” user. But still…a button isn’t hard to get right….]

The intermittent failure to activate quickly turned into a complete failure of the power button. The only thing that saved me from a service interruption is that Moto phones have a feature where the screen will turn on when you wave your hand over the front of them or if they detect motion, so you can swipe up and turn on the phone without using the power button. This allowed me to set my screen timeout to 15 seconds (to turn the phone off again) and continue using the phone without shutting it down until I got the warranty replacement. [Also, the “secured exchange” warranty replacement feature allowed me to never be without a phone…]

When I called Motorola, they initially claimed that my phone (identified by the IMEI) was out of warranty coverage, but when I was able to provide the Google store receipt that said I had purchased it only 11 months ago they honored their 1 year warranty.

I asked for the “secured exchange” return mentioned on their website (where they send a new phone out to you and authorize $223 on your credit card as a deposit for the safe return of the old phone) option and they initially were going to charge me a $25 “premium fee” for that service, but when I asked if I could do the “secured exchange” without the premium fee the customer support representative waived it for me.   [Their website had no mention of the $25 “premium fee”, so I’m not sure where it came from or why they waived it.]

Other than the standard annoyance of having to move all my data and applications to a new phone and set everything up again, the actual warranty exchange went smoothly.   [However, the Motorola website “ecosystem” had multiple issues with broken links, inability to create a new MotoID, etc… I had to use the phone support option.]

Update: The replacement phone’s power button died after a month…