Samsung is caught downplaying the performance of thousands of apps in its Galaxy phones, through an app called Game Optimization Service.
The app comes pre-installed in all premium Galaxy devices and is seen throttling popular apps including Samsung’s own. Although, it’s leaving benchmark apps in this process to attain high scores, thus fooling the users.
Samsung responded to this by reasoning it for optimizing the phone’s battery life and reducing heat due to long-term gaming sessions. Also, it’ll soon come up with a software update to let users decide on prioritizing the performance of apps.
Samsung Cheating on Users
Following the suite of OnePlus, Samsung is shamelessly caught in the act of throttling Android apps – in the name of optimizing battery life. As OnePlus did last year with its Performance Service app, Samsung does this year with the Game Optimization Service app.
This game launcher app comes pre-installed in all the flagship Galaxy phones and seemed to optimize the performance of games when running them. But it isn’t! Instead, it’s found the app is throttling the performance of thousands of Android apps in Galaxy phones.
This list is huge, and is said to be over 10,000 in total! People who ran tests and confirmed this said the apps are categorized into “game” and “non-game” counterparts, with only 3,200 of them as games. Rest apps include regular services coming from Google, Microsoft, and even Samsung itself!
Out of the 10,000+ apps, 233 are from Samsung and include names like its texting app, the contacts app, the calendar, the notes app, the phone app, Bixby, Samsung Pay, and even the camera. Further, Google’s got 169 apps on the list, including YouTube, Google Maps, the Play Store, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Play Services.
Samsung created an app called GOS and used the app to limit game performance, making the gaming experience worse. However, according to what the Korean community found out today, Samsung confirmed that it has put performance limits on more than 10,000 apps… pic.twitter.com/U58AreZZoo
— 한가련 (@GaryeonHan) March 2, 2022
Other popular apps including Netflix, Disney+, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc are on the list too. The only exceptions in this list are the benchmarking apps like Geekbench, 3D Mark, PCMark, GFXBench, Antutu, CPDT, and Androbench.
This isn’t surprising, as Samsung is throttling the other apps only to push benchmarking apps to best results, and fool users. And when the complaints on this issue rose, Samsung responded with the following announcement;
“We would like to inform you about the Galaxy S22 GOS. We are continuously working to expand user options and provide optimal performance by collecting opinions from customers. The Samsung Galaxy S22 series’ GOS (Game Optimizing Service) is preloaded with our app ‘ that optimizes CPU and GPU performance to prevent excessive heat during long gameplay. In order to meet the needs of various customers recently, we plan to implement an SW update that provides a performance priority option in the game booster lab within the game launcher app as soon as possible. We will continue to listen to consumers’ opinions and do our best for customer satisfaction and consumer protection.
thank you.”
