[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] chrcol:
I have moaned in the past about the rapid pace of Android OS development, and the usual implication of buying a new phone is you forced to upgrade android, but going from Android 6 to 8, looks like its going to be brutal for me, and hard decisions to be made.

On my old S7 phone running Android6, I have the following working reasonably well.

Xposed

Instagram made useable by xposed (app without it is horrible)

Same with snapchat

Various privacy enhancements thanks to xposed

Anag app works perfectly.

Apps mostly honour auto sync setting

However titanium backup only barely functions, it seems it only works properly with supersu which is considered obsolete these days, this app last worked properly on my s5.

Using android 9, there is no xposed at all, to me having no xposed on android is like going out in the street naked.

Using android 8, xposed is in beta, initially it seemed stable, but I have noticed the contacts app goes crazy and unstable as well as phone app after 2-3 days uptime if xposed is enabled on phone.

Some xposed modules have become abandonware and no longer work on Android 8

Some apps including Anag which has no alternative app have become abandonware and dont work properly or at all on Android 8.

Auto sync is disabled on the phone yet I keep getting notifications from apps, related to background sync activity they are doing, e.g. dominoes apps downloads an advert, and sends me a notification asking me if I am hungry to order some pizzas (never ever seen it do this on android 6), various other apps having similar type behaviours, just 10 mins ago backgrounds hd sent me a notification to inform me its downloaded new backgrounds, how has it done this when I havent gave it permission to background sync? ,either the auto sync setting is broken or there is some new feature in newer android that allows apps to spam you. I suspect its the latter, as I think even with auto sync enabled on android 6 I wasnt getting all this app spam.

The problem is this, new phone hardware is nice, my newest phone is lightning fast compared to my s7. But ultimately its the software that makes the phone. Sadly there is no Android 6 for the oneplus6, I dont expect much sympathy on the XDA community as the majority of people here seem happy to always jump on the latest builds of android without a second thought, often beta/alpha builds to boot. But felt like I needed to rant.

I dont know what I am going to do moving forward, I will probably test OOS 8.x, just to rule out custom rom issues, and if issues persist I can forsee myself selling the phone and buying an older model that still is faster (but wont be as fast) just so I can run android 6. I wonder if anyone else has ever deliberately avoided latest model phones to keep old android.

Its becoming evident to me, that many developers cannot keep up with the pace of android updates, so we get this happening, apps becoming abandonware, and users like myself either have to find replacement apps or accept to lose features on their phone. I wonder if IOS has these issues or if that has full backward compatibility that keeps old apps working. I wouldnt be unhappy if e.g. new android major releases were every 2 years with 5 years security support for each release as well. But a sane software support policy goes against google's policies.

Its kind of interesting as we have many news articles about the problem of android fragmentation as such, and often these articles blame everyone except google, they blame end users, they blame phone manufacturers, and they blame mobile carriers, but they never consider the problem might be google simply releasing new versions of android too rapidly.