Samsung’s app throttling tricks are making its customers mad
If there’s even the slightest possibility of something shady happening, people tend to take notice. Millions of customers across the globe who bought Samsung Galaxy phones are now taking notice of claims that the company has been artificially slowing down their phones.
It’s not a good look on Samsung. The claims about its app throttling tricks have led to outrage online. There’s still no clear statement as yet from the company explaining its side of the story.
Customers want answers from Samsung about app throttling
This has nothing to do with the chipsets inside these phones. Samsung’s GOS (Games Optimization Service) is the real culprit. It throttles both the CPU and GPU performance aggressively for reasons that are best known to the company.
Given its name, you’d think that GOS only throttles games. There’s actually a list of over 10,000 apps that see reduced performance as a result of the Games Optimization Service. The list includes apps like TikTok, Netflix, Instagram and even Samsung’s own apps like Samsung Pay and Secure Folder.
There’s outrage among Samsung fans because this list doesn’t include benchmarking apps like 3D Mark and GeekBench. Since the CPU is not throttled when these apps are run, they may provide results that may not necessarily provide an accurate picture of the device’s performance.
We’ve seen similar behavior in the past from other manufacturers. OnePlus was found to be relying on the same trick, where benchmark apps were not slowed down but others like Twitter and Chrome were. OnePlus stood behind its decision, saying that this was done to optimize heat management and battery life.
Samsung may offer a similar explanation but it won’t be good enough. Many customers have taken to social media and the company’s own forums to express their displeasure. They rightly feel that this behavior should have been made clear to them from the outset. Furthermore, they should have the option to disable GOS if they so desire.
For now, Samsung has only said that it’s investigating the matter and will have a statement soon. We do hope that it provides more clarity on the matter. Its customers deserve better.
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