After outcry, Samsung Galaxy S22 will no longer throttle apps
Samsung were recently caught throttling the Galaxy S22 with over 10,000 apps, including TikTok and Facebook, with their Game Optimising Service (GOS). GOS was designed to manage battery life when playing games, however what’s interesting is GOS did not actually throttle any games, but rather throttled apps, with the exception being benchmarking apps (suspiciously).
Users were able to bypass the throttling by manually renaming apps to specific games, essentially tricking GOS into not running. Performance increases were up to 45%, and were experienced by both Snapdragon and Exynos models.
After public outcry, with several Samsung devices being delisted from Geekbench, Samsung have responded, promising an update which will give users the option to disable GOS.
Samsung’s response says ‘GOS was designed to prevent excessive heating when playing demanding games for long periods’. However, they did not acknowledge or respond to why regular apps were being throttled, nor why GOS did not actually throttle games - which is what it is supposedly designed to do. Furthermore, they did not say if the update would have GOS enabled as default, or whether users have to manually turn it off in the settings.
We think Samsung aren’t telling us the whole story. The latest Samsung Galaxy S22 has been suffering from various battery related issues, with barely 5 hours of screen on time. This is partly due to the poor thermals of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip and smaller battery.
Without app throttling, battery life would be even less than 5 hours, which is quite simply unacceptable for any phone - let alone a flagship phone. Perhaps Samsung had no choice but to throttle apps to increase battery life and decided to disguise it as a ‘Game Optimising Service’ to avoid any backlash.
Either way, they have been caught. We doubt Samsung will ever tell us the whole story, as they essentially will have to admit the Samsung Galaxy S22 has poor hardware and software.