Initial thoughts on the 4a with Android 11:

• The phone is MUCH more responsive than the Moto G8 plus, much quicker to use
• The size is much nicer to hold, and fits in the pocket more easily. You have to be a little more careful where you click
• Power management is much more aggressive. You have to manually tell it to let things like alarm clocks use battery in the background, even then I'm not sure they'll be reliable. Life360 tracking / alerting isn't working well, even after I removed all battery optimisations.
• There's no easy way I've found to turn the LED torch on with gestures. With the G8 I could do "double karate chop" to toggle torch on, really handy.
• Android gestures suck with third party launchers, so I turned them off
• Battery doesn't seem as good as with the Moto G8 plus, but it's 3000mah compared with 4000mah so expected
• Transferring apps / content with a USB-C to USB-C cable worked well. It then when to the app store and downloaded all the apps again anyway. I still had to log into almost every app.
• Glass seems smoother / less more slippery / easier to glide type on

Otherwise it's a standard Android phone.