First and foremost, Lollipop. We continue to work very closely with our partners at Motorola to get the Android Lollipop updates to our members with first generation phones. Updating capable phones to Lollipop 5.1 is currently our top engineering priority and our teams are working diligently to get these updates implemented. We received the most recent build for Lollipop from our partners in early October. And, we are working to better free ourselves up from the sometimes lengthy certification processes involved to be more agile with major OS updates for the good of our members. We are committed to communicating our progress bi-weekly over in our Help Updates section, so be sure to check that out. Now, on to what was new in October!

Great things come in threes. Goals, stooges, tries…all preferably packaged as sets of three. So it’s with particular satisfaction that the October launch of the Moto G 3rd Gen. brings our phone portfolio to three distinctly great phones for our members. Couple any of these phones with our great monthly voice, text and data (three again!) plans and start experiencing one of the greatest deals in wireless. But what if you’re one of those ‘more is always better’ people? Well, while we celebrate having three phones, we’re not completely satisfied. So we’re taking the advice we’ve gotten from you all to heart and we’re spending some serious time and budget investigating ways to expand our phone portfolio. More to come on that topic, but feel free to engage with us in the Think Tank by submitting your ideas!

Speaking of the Think Tank, we recently whittled down the number of ideas and now have just under 100 great ideas from members, which we’ll be monitoring and engaging with more frequently. Previously, it had grown to over 950 ideas, which proved too unwieldy to manage effectively for both ourselves and our engaged members. Any older ideas are not lost, however, and can be found in our Think Tank archive. We also released an app update which everyone should be sure to update to soon.

New in October:

PHONE AND SERVICE RELATED:

Moto G (3rd Gen.) Launch

Republic App Update

Republic Think Tank Clean-up

In Progress Items to Improve your Experience:

(Due to the more complex nature of these items, no official timing is set nor is delivery guaranteed, but they are being worked on regularly):

SMALLER SCOPE ITEMS:

Gifting/Purchase without Plan Selection in our RW Store

MMS Interoperability with Cricket

My Account Portal Redesign

WiFi Manager Improvements

LARGER SCOPE ITEMS:

Tethering Capability for Republic Refund Plan Subscribers

Next Gen. Data Saver Mode (previously named Background Data Suppression Tool)

Next Generation WiFi Calling

Multi-Device Experience (Bridge)

Next Generation Device (High Hat)

Multiple Cellular Carrier Experience (Tempo)

Android Lollipop 5.1 Update (Moto G (1st Gen.), Moto X (1st Gen.), and Moto E (1st Gen.))

Member Financing for Devices