[Note 7 Questions & Answers] BarryH_GEG:
I came from a Note5 and thought my (pre-replacement) Note7’s performance was equal and battery life was better but not fantastic. I was pretty satisfied and thought it was a very worthy upgrade. When using my (pre-replacement) Note7 it would occasionally get for want of a better word – draggy. Scrolling and transitions would sometimes stutter but it was very occasional so I chalked it up to early s/w.

Flash forward to my replacement Note7. Like many here I was experiencing degraded performance compered to my first one. And battery life was about 20% worse with both phones configured the exact same way. So I spent yesterday and today rebuilding my phone from scratch. I hard reset it via the diagnostic menu and hand-loaded every one of my 100+ apps and configured every individual system and app setting.

I’ll start at the end – it’s like a totally different phone. It’s far more fluid, scrolls beautifully, transitions far more seamlessly, and apps open and close faster. I can’t speak to battery life yet because I was playing with it non-stop. I intentionally left if off the charger while I was configuring it and preliminarily battery usage was surprising low.

Here are some findings:

Smart Switch may work fantastically on phones without tons of apps, syncs, and complex settings but it appears to overwrite or duplicate apps and system files. For example the Samsung apps and widgets on my Note5 were carried over to my Note7 even though it had newer versions of the same items. I had two identical versions of Optical Scanner with different icons on my Note7 after Smart Switch was done. I know/knew it hosed Android Auto because I had to uninstall/reinstall my music apps to get AA to play them. My hypothesis is that conflicts are being created in the background and some apps even though they appear to work fine may have anomalies that affect their and overall system performance. And I'd imagine the unnecessary and duplicative files are cumulative. Meaning as I went Note5>first Note7>second Note7 the last Note7 ended up with files and settings it didn't need from both previous phones.

Samsung Cloud is incredibly invasive and it collected 12GB of data from my pre-replacement Note7 without me even knowing it.

It also took over my Gallery and was auto-syncing it which appears to be its default setting. Again, just a hypothesis, but when my phone(s) were getting draggy it may have been Samsung Cloud syncing in the background. I actually found this all accidentally. I moved my photos and music from another device via microSD and when I went in to the Gallery all my photos were duplicated. Also, when sync is enabled, you can’t use the tools in the Gallery to move and organize your photos. While Samsung Cloud is “free” with 15GB of storage and extremely well integrated it’s headless. Meaning you can’t access it directly via mobile or PC to organize and manage your content. I bet that since Samsung Cloud is a system app it could be contributing to high Android System usage. I completely turned it off but didn't disable it in Applications. Doing so with Samsung's in-built apps sometimes causes more problems than it solves when other apps continually poll the disabled app.

Back in the day when my mobile’s were less complicated I’d always hard reset them and then restore them manually after an update. That’s essentially what I did by hard resetting my replacement Note 7 after two AT&T updates. One was a system update right after the phone came out and the other the green battery update we’ve all been receiving. I don’t know if that helped but it was part of my two-day restoration process.

It would be great if others that might be having performance/battery problems confirm or refute my experiences. I know using automated back up and restore tools is easy but I doubt I’ll use them anymore based on this experience. My phone really flies now and is significantly faster and smoother than my retired Note7. The jury is still out on battery life but the drain rate over the past two days was surprisingly low considering all the processor intensive stuff I was doing. And the majority of it was via SideSync over Wi-Fi while the phone was downloading apps and data via Wi-Fi at the same time it was connected to my computer. Through it all the phone was warm but never got hot.

Good luck out there. ;)