How can I avoid the Oreo update on my Galaxy S7 forever?

[Nooblet]

I've read a few reviews of the update which say the phone is noticeably slower afterwards. I love my phone and don't need any "improvements". Frankly, the entire practice of forced updates is maddening. We wouldn't accept this practice for any other product we buy -- i.e. someone sneaks into your garage and changes the way the radio works on your car without asking your permission. Not sure why it continues with phones.

Any advice you can offer would be much appreciated.

 

[Rukbat]

It's not "changes the way your radio works", it's "changing something so the engine doesn't keep quitting" or "changing something so your garage door doesn't keep opening by itself, allowing the neighborhood kids to get into your garage and break everything".

Most updates are security updates. Oreo came out in August 2017. Since then, there have been 10 updates, only one of them going from 8.0 to 8.1, the rest were for security. (And there are still a couple of things that no one's come up with a patch for and one that may need a whole new CPU architecture to make computers safe from it (and that means Xeons, x64s, x86s, iPhones and Androids).

You can refuse updates for a while, but eventually the update goes in without asking. Or you could root the phone and disable updating. But when someone comes out with a new exploit, Google comes out with a patch for it which you didn't take, and your phone becomes useless, it won't be Google's fault. (I'm just waiting for the "comes in through the powerlines and the charger" exploit. If that happens, computers, including cellphones, and the entire IoT, are doomed.)