Play store version is still latest as far as I know. I remember reading from Kevin I believe it was, that a new android version was in development, but not ready for deployment yet.

For the differences in CPU, it looks to be very minimal. Not worth the cost for crunching I would think. According to this site the 845 is a whopping 5% faster than the 835. And that is assuming you get the full clock speeds out of the big.LITTLE architecture. You would likely hit thermal throttling well before that top clock speed is reached and sustained. I personally prefer to keep my daily phone as a phone only, and not a cruncher. Once it is retired and a new phone is purchased, it is moved to cruncher status. That way I can better manage thermals on the CPU and battery, to get the maximum amount of work from the device. If you like to run your primary phone as a cruncher, I would suggest starting with a small amount of the cores enabled, maybe 4 out of 8, and see how it handles the heat. Then gradually go up on the cores until you are hitting max battery temps or thermal throttling. CPU-Z is a good program to download from the play store, It will show you the core and clock speeds, as well as it should show you the thermals on the battery. But YMMV as I don't know if all phones support this.

Sorry for the late reply. Was on a long weekend with the kids at the beach :)
I'm not sure what would be considered a "safe" battery temperature. I think default on BOINC is 35C. You can set BOINC to whatever temp you like, but I wouldn't set it too high. I would go by touch. If you touch the back of the phone and it is warm/hot, I would say that is too warm. definitely download cpu-z and keep an eye on thermals. That would be the best way to see when the phone starts thermal throttling. As I mentioned earlier, I run phones as dedicated crunchers and remove batteries if possible and power directly from USB power. I also run active cooling on them to try to get the best possible performance. I have ran phones before with little to no thermal management, and the batteries bloat up like balloons within a month or two. Which gets dangerous.

I agree with stock android. I purchased a Pixel as my current phone, and really like it. It is stock android, and no bloatware. I also get security updates and new versions of android as they are released by Google. If you have been having problems with the S8 and are no longer using it as a primary phone, I would suggest performing a factory reset. Once reset, I would go into the apps and disable any that you won't be using. Leaving them enabled just uses more storage and updates to bloat up the phone. You could also root it and install a custom ROM if you enjoy doing that sort of stuff. S8s are very popular so I am sure there would be options for this route if needed.

Hi,
That sounds like a fantastic idea. Since I live in northern Canada, it gets pretty cold here in the winter.
I should really figure out how to run a phone without having a battery inside. I have an old s4 here that takes a removable battery.

Thanks for that!
I will give it a shot on my galaxy s4 to see if it works.
Having no vision I sure won't be soldering anything any time soon, but it would be a fun project I'm sure :)

If I had the time and energy I suppose I could buy a little army of android phones that could be powered without batteries, since I'm sure the older ones are pretty cheaply found.

Oh now that would be nice, I'll give that a shot. The s4 doesn't seem to take power by USB alone so that will be my first test.

I just got the OnePlus 6t yesterday.

Running with 4 cores is averaging 2600-2800 MHZ. I haven't really paid attention to CPU temperatures on phones before since I thought that Android 8.0 and up had made that impossible. The thermals in this thing are kind of amazing, though - reaching 85 C with 4 cores active - that seems quite excessive to me.

What do folks recommend for cooling solutions? I probably won't run boinc that often but when I do...just a laptop cooling stand or something else?