[ZTE Axon 7 Guides, News, & Discussion] Menergy:
I am missing the stock Nougat 'lock screen' option in the Quick options menu. I am using an app to soft lock the screen at the moment which works but am not sure at all why they removed it in first place.

I am also missing the Messaging and Phone customization options available in Nougat, including the different message bubbles types and the background change settings. It is now simply white and blue and you couldn't change it.

I have had a hard time fixing the Notification problem Oreo brought to many apps, including system, resulting in oversleeping for alarm clock app not working at all. This may not be a particular problem of ZTE directly since apparently it is an Oreo issue but I still don't understand why so many notifications have been forced to the swipe-down menu without default option to disable them. Like "this and this process running in the background" and using default notification tone for every single thing happening to the phone. Adjusting settings in Android System notification modes solved some problems but delayed or not showed at all certain notifications like SMS messages or alarm clock not working - even though these were specifically made to pop and make sound.

Battery life for me varies. It may be up to 10-12 hours if I don't do almost anything and just keep it in stand-by to 3-4-5 hours if I use the screen, some browsing and listening to music. Screen-on-Time in general is up to 2-3 hours in best case scenario. Also sometimes for no apparent reason I see the battery percentage going down like every few seconds by 1 percent and with no use of anything special, just the screen. Overall I could rate it (a little) worse than Nougat considering that I've now gone through all Power settings and disabling anything I don't need per app.

I can only congratulate ZTE for making Dolby Atmos now working on both earphones and front speakers at all times, including with custom player equalizer running at the same time as Dolby Atmos. It never worked for me and was also accompanied with various bugs on all 6, 6.1, 7 and 7.1.

The "choose what your SD card should do" on every restart is pretty bad and I strongly prefer the Nougat behavior when it simply worked. Maybe adding a Setting - "do not ask again" or an option in the System Settings where you can change the status of the SD card on the go would work better than unmounting it every time. This causes many issues with file managers, players and different other apps with files located on the SD card. I hope they re-work it.

Finally, I noticed that Ultra Power Saver works in a much worse way than it did on Nougat. It kind of goes into another OS mode upon return from which it does not start apps that are set to auto-start upon reboot. The Nougat style of simply black-and-whit-ening the screen and turning off any data was so much better and didn't return the phone in a half-functioning state when connected to the charger. Also at 15% as I adjusted it, the middle power saving function (Power Saver or so) does not seem to be at least visibly working so the battery keeps draining as fast as if it was not on.

So, in short - dark(er) Quick Menu, getting back Nougat default app customization options, fixing the SD card message upon every reboot, not forcing TouchPal to be default keyboard or in use even if another keyboard is chosen, or disabling both, and possibly working on better battery life would be all amazing. I still think ZTE did a great job with 8.0 and am happy they finally released it to us.