When you buy an expensive electronic device with a warranty, you hope you never have to use said warranty. It's always at least somewhat of a pain. For many Motorola customers, the process has been worse than that. We've been seeing an unusual number of complaints about Motorola's warranty support lately, and it looks like it might finally be coming back to bite the company. A $5 million class action complaint has been filed because of Moto's ongoing warranty issues.

You don't have to look far on the internet to find horror stories of dealing with Motorola's warranty support. This will happen with most smartphone makers—someone is always unhappy. The volume of complaints about Motorola seems substantially higher, though. You can look at the Moto customer forums or the Moto X subreddit and see tons of people complaining that they've been without a phone for weeks or even months as they wait on Motorola to fulfill the terms of its warranty. Some of them even paid extra for Moto Care. Here's one, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and you get the idea.

The main plaintiff in the case is Georgia resident Douglas Lynch, who alleges it took Motorola months to replace his defective Moto 360 late last year. When the company finally did so, it sent him a cheaper model than the one he paid for. This appears to be a weirdly common occurrence among Motorola customers. The court filing includes a number of additional sample complaints with similar themes, but it's really not hard to find plenty more if you look in the aforementioned locations. Motorola has admitted to delays in processing warranty claims, but that won't do much to help people who are without their expensive devices for weeks or months.

I can personally attest to having good luck with Motorola's warranty support several years ago. Then, things started to get spotty last year. I haven't had to deal with the company more recently, and by the sounds of it, I'm lucky. If the case goes forward, class actions can take years to reach a conclusion. If you bought a Motorola device, you might end up getting some small amount of money. In the short term, maybe this will get Moto/Lenovo to reassess the situation.