Hi,
I'm not sure that playing android version on an windows emulator is a good idea, as you said, you encountered some weird bugs playing that way and to my knowledge, noone reported even remotely similar issue to what you described. Wouldn't it be easier to simply run PC version?
As for upgrades, tthey're not only stat dependent but also time, so using cheats to max stats doesn't mean you are both getting softlocked and not getting upgrades, it's just that normally each upgrade would be available after few days (no idea why dev did it this way)
Hope this helps,
Cheers