[Samsung Galaxy S7 Questions and Answers] paulrhyan:
Around late June 2018 my phone was updated to Oreo. I posted this complaining of a slow and sluggish phone with poor battery life. After a full clean flash the phone improved noticeably but still wasn't where I thought it should be. Certain apps still seemed slow to open I continue to have WiFi issues.

About four to six weeks later there was another update. I'm not sure if it was a Samsung update or an AT&T update (security patch maybe?). Once again all aspects of the phone became slow and battery life plummeted. I was back down to eight or nine hours per charge. So, once again, I performed a clean flash of the phone and things got a little better. I was back on par with my initial post-Oreo clean flash and still nowhere near my pre-Oreo performance.

About four or five weeks ago my phone started nagging me to update again. I kept WiFi turned off and continually procrastinated the update for about a week or two. Finally I allowed the update and again I am having major performance issues. Battery life is unacceptable. I get around eight hours per charge. All apps are noticeably slower to open and run slower. My G-Mail app is slow to open and show new correspondence. My navigation app is virtually intolerable. The telephone app takes forever to open. Often it will ring four times and go to voicemail before the caller ID opens to show who is calling. My Swype keyboard sometimes takes two or three seconds to come up also, I forgot to backup my custom dictionary before my last clean flash so I lost all my slang and cuss words.

Here is an interesting and annoying quirk. Bluetooth now fails. I'll get in the car and the phone will automatically sync to my JVC receiver. This still happens without any issues. The issue is that, at random times, the music will just stop playing through the stereo and it will play through the phone's speaker. The bluetooth connection is not broken or interrupted (the devices are still conntected), it just randomly starts sending music to the phone's speaker instead of the car's stereo. The easiest work around I have is to hit the pause button on the car's stereo, wait one or two seconds then un-pause. It may be simple but it is BS. I shouldn't have to do it. It wasn't a problem before and it should not be a problem now. This happens with other bluetooth devices as well such as my headphones (no pause button) and a bluetooth adapter (also no pause button) that is connected to an older home stereo that doesn't have bluetooth.

So here are my questions:

1) How can I know who is responsible for these updates? Is it AT&T? Samsung? Which 'higher power' can I direct complaints to? Honestly it feels like my phone's performance is purposely being compromised in an effort to push me to a new device. If this is the case then I'll purchase a cheap 'Sprawl-Mart' phone. At least I know I'll be buying a cheap, slow and crappy phone for $60 or $70 instead of a $750 'flagship' phone that is only good for 18 months.

2) Is it possible to set my phone to never even look for updates? I look at it this way; if I have to perform a clean flash every time my phone updates then I don't want the updates anymore. Since Oreo, none of the updates seem to provide me with any noticeable benefits.