These WiFi products and the associated app aren’t actually from Motorola.

As mentioned in the article, they are products of Premier LogiTech, LLC, who have licensed the Motorola brand name.

I don't know, my first "smart" phone was a Motorola Atrix 4G. You know, that one with (one of) the first fingerprint scanner and that thingy that allowed you to dock it to something like a laptop and thus you'd have a working laptop thingy.

Its wifi/bt card broke exactly one year after I bought it. It worked exactly for 365 days. That was 100% hardware failure and planned obsolescence.

Needless to say never bought not even looked at anything Motorola ever since.

There is no singular Motorola. The company has been spinning off different parts of itself for quite a long time.

In 2011/2012, it was divided into different parts. The biggest were Motorola Solutions (mostly focused 2-way radios and related communications infrastructure; stuff commonly used by public safety entities) and Motorola Mobility (mostly cell phones and related stuff).

Google bought Motorola Mobility. It has been said that this was because Google wanted their patent portfolio. In 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo: The same Lenovo that makes ThinkPads is also who makes Motorola phones today.

Somewhere along the line, their name also got licensed out for home networking bits. That appears to be the products that the Mashable article writes about. This history is murkier, but it appears that some combination of Premier LogiTech and Boundless Devices (whoever tf these companies are) is responsible for making the Motorola-branded routers in question.

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tl;dr, the Motorola that makes the radios that cops carry on their hip, the Motorola that makes Android phones that consumers carry in their pocket, and the Motorola that makes home routers are not the same company. Like -- at all.

Conflating them is easy because it is, frankly, a confusing mess.

But still: The shitty software on a Motorola phone is not cut from the same cloth as the shitty software on a Motorola router. They're products of very different companies that share nothing but a common trademark.