Some of Samsung’s smartphones include software that appears to artificially limit, or throttle, the performance of thousands of popular apps, Android Authority reports. Behavioral reporting has grown on Twitteras well as Samsung’s Korean community forums.
At the heart of the problem is Samsung’s software called Game Optimizing Service (GOS), which is said to limit the performance of 10,000 apps. This list includes popular apps like Instagram, Netflix, TikTok, and even Samsung’s own apps like Secure Folder and Samsung Pay. Importantly, it doesn’t seem to include benchmarking apps like 3DMark and GeekBench, which means they might not give an accurate picture of a phone’s performance. So a benchmarking app will work just fine, but when you actually use an app like TikTok, you might not get all the performance you expect (and, arguably, deserve).
A test conducted by a Korean YouTuber shows the magnitude of the impact this can have. Just by renaming a benchmarking app which usually wouldn’t be limited (3DMark) to the name of a popular game which is (Genshin Impact), they would have been able to trick the phone into limiting the Wild Life benchmark Extreme by 3DMark, reducing its overall score from 2618 to 1141.
What’s unclear right now is which phones come with this game optimization service. Android Authority reports that he couldn’t find the software on his Galaxy S22, Galaxy S20 FE, or Galaxy S10E devices, but they did find it on the Galaxy S21 Plus. But, confusingly, 9to5Google reports that the software was installed on their Galaxy S22 Plus. The Korean Youtuber quoted above appears to show the software running on a Galaxy S22 Ultra.
If the story of an Android device maker throttling app performance sounds familiar, it might be because OnePlus got caught in a very similar situation last year, where it hijacked popular apps like Chrome and Twitter (but not benchmark apps) far from its the high-performance CPU cores of the phone’s processor. OnePlus justified its decision by saying it optimized battery life and heat, but users were rightly annoyed that they weren’t told about this behavior ahead of time.
Samsung has not yet responded The edgeAsking for comment on what the game optimization service is supposed to accomplish, although if it’s similar to OnePlus it seems likely it’s also aimed at improving battery life. But what’s less clear is why users don’t have the option to turn off the behavior, or why Samsung didn’t tell them about it in the first place.
