[Android Central Question]

I recently bought the HTC U11+ and I found a couple of weird things in the camera. I owned the HTC One M9+ from the start of 2016 until now, and on that (keep in mind that is a pretty old device) phone, those problems didn't exist. I noticed that on the front facing camera, everything looks smooth. I tought it was the Makeup filter but even after disabling it I still saw that everything looks smooth and blurry and without really much detail. The second thing that I found very irritating in the camera is that there is a sacrifice of MegaPixels for higher picture ratio. On the HTC One M9+ that I owned, you could change the ratio however you wanted without MegaPixel loss. So to use the 18:9 picture ratio, it works with 8MP instead of 12MP. For hours I played with the settings to no avail... Now, the HTC U11+ that I'm using, runs on Android 8.0, and if I remember correctly, there's an 8.1 version available for the device. Will this version fix the problems stated above? Is there a downloadable camera application that can resolve these problems? Please help me with this problem since I could not find relevent information on that matter. Also I wanted to state is that the actual front facing camera is THAT bad (from my tests) that the pictures taken by the front facing camera on the M9+ were better! The one thing that I can't complain is the apeture on the device, giving me better pictures in low light situations. A thing that was non-existent on my older devices. But it's only in the main camera not the front facing camera.

[ManiacJoe]

For the megapixels, to get the most of them, you always need to pick a ratio that is close to shape of the physical sensor.
For my LG V30, this seems to be a square, so I use the 4:3 shape to maximize the megapixels.

For the smoothness problem, could this be related to noise reduction for high ISO images?