Samsung responds to app-throttling discovery, promises to ship an off switch

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Enlarge / The Galaxy S22 Ultra. It has a pen. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung has responded to reports that it is throttling thousands of apps on the Galaxy line of smartphones.

With the launch of the Galaxy S22, users found the packed-in "Game Optimizing Service" contained a list of approximately 10,000 apps that were being throttled. This list is basically every popular, well-known app you can think of, covering everything from games to core Samsung apps like the home screen. The only apps the service seemingly didn't target were benchmark apps, which means benchmark ratings are inaccurately reporting how much power the most-used apps have access to. Modifying a benchmark app like Geekbench to be disguised as a normal app leads to CPU scores dropping as much as 46 percent. The new Galaxy S22 isn't the only smartphone with this throttling feature; it goes back as far as the Galaxy S10.

Samsung gave a statement to The Verge today, saying, "We value the feedback we receive about our products and after careful consideration, we plan to roll out a software update soon so users can control the performance while running game apps." The spokesperson continued, “The Game Optimizing Service (GOS) has been designed to help game apps achieve a great performance while managing device temperature effectively. GOS does not manage the performance of non-gaming apps."

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