Dodgy practices of some businesses.
Never buy a phone that is only for the Chinese market.
Four months of waiting paid off and I finally got my Nokia 7. But right out of the box I was in for a nasty ride. Switching on the phone and connecting it to WiFi resulted in a few minutes of trying to get updates followed by a timeout error. I did not think much of it at first and tried to carry on but the phone would not.
Doing some searching I found that resellers who sell these phones outside of China load a hacked firmware on it so that it has all the normal Google apps and languages. However this FrankenROM has no support so it gets no updates and some claim it even contains malware and spyware.
After spending R77 ($5) I got an unlock file for the bootloader and could load the stock firmware. This came with it's own set of issues as it has no Google apps and updates are very slow, I think the update server is in China.
Having spent the best part of the day with the phone I finally have it setup more or less the way I like my phones, as close to stock Android as possible.
What a waste of time.