Back in 2016, Motorola released three entries in its G-series with the Moto G4, G4 Play, and G4 Plus. The G4 and G4 Plus were both updated to Nougat later in the year, but the same could never be said for the G4 Play. Motorola was running Nougat soak tests for the G4 Play at one point in 2017, but an official over-the-air update was never released.
Now, in January of 2018, this is finally changing. One Redditor shared a screenshot of their G4 Play, and sure enough, it's running Android 7.1.1 Nougat (a version of Android that's now 13 months old) with the November 2017 security patch.
We aren't sure why it took Motorola so long to get Nougat pushed to the G4 Play, but we're certainly glad that it's finally here. Unfortunately, don't expect to be using Oreo at any point in the future. This is the last planned update that Motorola has for the G4 Play, but considering that this is a phone nearing two years of age that had a retail price of $99, that's not all that surprising.
