Recent update: from best phone in the world to absolute rubbish

[Christian Martens]

Hello,
I've got a Nokia 7 Plus for only a few weeks now. It was the best phone I ever had (I was used to an outdated Windows Phone so..) until I did a software update to Android 9 (?) this morning. Now I have a stupid date thing on the home screen and I can't delete it. And at the bottom Google has dicided to put an even more stupid search thing which (suprise) can't be deleted. On top of that I can't find one improvement in this update and I've allready walked into tens of other little naggy things.
Long story short: My phone has become worse than the Windows Phone I had before and I want to get rid of this complete update. Or at least change the things I've discribed above here. Can anyone help please?

Thank you so much

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! You can modify all of the homescreen issues by installing a 3rd party launcher like Nova Launcher (which is still something you can only do on an Android device). That's the first thing I do on all of my devices. Although I think the Pixel Launcher is fine, I much prefer being able to set things up the way I want.

It's hard to comment on your tens of other little naggy things -- if you elaborate on them, perhaps we could suggest solutions.

You can't roll back updates easily on most phones. Samsung phones have special tools that allow you to flash prior firmware, but then you lose the important benefits of security updates.

 

[Christian Martens]

Thank you for your answer!
I do have to apologize I bit, I'm from the Netherlands (so my English may be a bit, weird sometimes) When I wrote this question it was early in the morning around here and I had just spent the whole night working when my phone decided to basicly kill itself. After that I spent half an hour in a chat with a Nokia support guy who basiscly told me no to everything and then started to ask for a 5 star review about him. Needless to say: I was a bit angry about all this.

Anyway, I'm not too good with phones (guess that's why I didn't like the update) so I don't even know exactly what a launcher is but it's sounds like a good plan anyway, so I will try that.
A bit more information about what's bothering me: They've created an entirely extra "screen" on my phone just so they could a date-thingy there, the one that can't be deleted. The physical screen of the phone is huge but now the bottom 10% is useless because of the Google search thing.
I don't like the look of the icons in the "settings swipe down-thing" (I don't know how you call this, it's when you swipe down from the top of the screen to turn on/off wifi and bluetooth and stuff) and the fact that you have to swipe down twice to reach settings, not the biggest problem in the world but then again, why would they do that? I can't see anymore if I'm on 4G, 3G, H+ or if I have mobile internet service at all since they got rid of the icons for that? When I want to exit apps I now have to swipe them up instead of to the right (told you it were "little naggy" things ), they've put the clock to the left instead of the right side (come to think of it, I may be a bit OCD haha). As a matter of fact I now have three clocks on the damn thing (again, I allready had the clock-thing covered by a fine "third party" widget). Other things: it seems the battery is draining faster now. I used to be able to use the phone nearly two days without a charge, now it "cost" me 20% battery life to type this message. And the funny thing is, I'm not even using my phone to do that.. So the battery drained 20% while my phone was on the table with the screen switched off as I'm using a laptop to type this.. And I also have less to none reception while I'm in the same place in my house where I had a "full bar" yesterday.
What the hell did they do..?

 

[B. Diddy]

I agree -- I'm not a big fan of homescreen widgets you can't get rid of (like Google's At A Glance widget and the Google search bar) -- again, that's why I much prefer using a 3rd party launcher.

You can't do much about how the Quick Settings toggles look, since that's a system thing. You can probably bring down the Quick Settings panel with one swipe by swiping down with two fingers, not one -- that's how things work on my Pixel 2 XL, and I think that's how it's worked for a while on most Android devices (can't remember which version this started with).

I also wish they kept the System Settings icon on the notification panel (i.e., not having to swipe down the Quick Settings panel for it), but i get around that by using Notification Toggle, a nifty app that allows you to add a customized toggle bar in the notification panel. I have the System Settings icon there, along with shortcuts for the Play Store and Calculator.

I thought the cell signal icon still shows LTE vs HSPA, but I can't tell right now since I'm on a plane. It could be dependent on the manufacturer as well, since different manufacturers can tweak how the icons look.

Swiping up to remove an app from the Recent Apps screen was a necessity, since they changed it from a vertical scroll to a horizontal scroll. There have been a lot of discussions about that overall change -- I haven't found it to be a big deal, since I use Recent Apps to to switch between apps, not to close apps. You really shouldn't have to close apps in Android -- let the system take care of that.

The battery drain and the signal issues are probably related. If the phone has poor cell signal, that typically eats up battery more quickly. See if wiping the cache partition does anything -- it can be helpful for various issues after a major system update, and won't affect any personal data: https://www.hardreset.info/devices/nokia/nokia-7-plus/recovery-mode/ (I think the image in Step 4 isn't correct -- follow the steps described in the text, and don't get thrown off by that image.)

 

[B. Diddy]

Update -- now that I'm back in the US, I can tell you that my Pixel 2 XL running Pie on T-Mobile does show LTE vs H+ in the status bar.