Samsung is accused of arbitrarily reducing the performance of smartphones

As reported by Android Authority, some Samsung smartphones can automatically limit or throttle the performance of thousands of apps. A lot of reports were shared on Twitter and Samsung forums in Korea.

At the heart of the problem is a piece of Samsung software called Game Optimizing Service (GOS), which is said to be able to tweak the performance of around 10,000 smartphone apps. There are many popular apps like Instagram, Netflix, TikTok, even Samsung apps like Secure Folder and Samsung Pay.

Importantly, however, it doesn’t include performance benchmarking apps, like 3DMark and GeekBench. So benchmarking apps can measure the maximum performance of the smartphone, but when using other apps in real life, users will not get the full performance.

A Korean YouTuber performed a test to prove the above allegation. This guy renamed the benchmarking app 3DMark to the name of the popular game Genshin Impact. As a result, the measured performance score was reduced from 2,618 points to 1,141 points.

It is currently unclear which Samsung smartphones are affected by Game Optimizing Service. Android Authority said it did not find this GOS app on the Galaxy S22, Galaxy S20 FE or Galaxy S10E, but did on the Galaxy S21. However, another report by 9t05Google says that GOS is installed on the Galaxy S22 Plus. While the Korean YouTuber above has also seen GOS on the Galaxy S22 Ultra.

This is not the first time a smartphone company has arbitrarily tweaked the device’s performance. OnePlus faced similar accusations last year, when it arbitrarily redirected popular applications like Chrome and Twitter away from the high-performance CPU core, while performance measurement applications could still function. operate at full capacity.

The reason why smartphone manufacturers do this is because they want to optimize the battery life and temperature of the device. But they often don’t tell users, and also skew performance scores in theory and in real life. The Verge reports that Samsung has yet to comment on these allegations.

Reference: theverge