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Samsung was recently caught artificially throttling the performance of over 10,000 apps using its Game Optimization Service (GOS). The company gave this practice the name of battery saving and thermal management. But users are seeing it as false advertising since GOS doesn’t throttle benchmark apps. South Korean watchdog has received a formal complaint from consumers and is expected to launch an investigation into the matter soon. Meanwhile, Samsung has published a FAQ (via) regarding this controversy.
Published on the company’s official support website for South Korea, the FAQ explains how GOS works and why is it throttling the performance of those apps. To begin with, Samsung reiterates that GOS is designed to provide optimal gaming performance to users while also keeping battery life and overheating of the device in check.
The company says this service only throttles the performance of high-end game apps and not anything else. Reports of GOS slowing down apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Netflix aren’t true. The GOS package does include a list of 10,000 apps but that is for the service to determine game apps and activate performance optimizations accordingly. It doesn’t throttle all the apps in this list as originally reported.
For this very reason, GOS isn’t slowing down benchmark apps as well. Since those are non-game apps, the service doesn’t act on them. But that still is some sort of benchmark manipulation as the results show the true potential of the devices but the same level of performance is not available to users. Geekbench has already banned the Galaxy S22 trio and other affected Samsung smartphones over this benchmark manipulation.
How will Samsung fix this GOS issue?
GOS is not a new service on Samsung smartphones. It has been around since 2016. So why is it causing problems now, and why it doesn’t affect all devices? Well, according to the company, it wasn’t forced before. There was a way around it. With One UI 4.0, Samsung blocked that. It further ensured that users can’t disable GOS with the release of One UI 4.1.
Samsung has already promised to fix this all by making those optimizations optional with a future software update. But there arises another question. If GOS prevented the device from overheating, won’t prioritizing performance over everything else cause serious heating issues? Regarding that, Samsung says it will still apply a temperature control algorithm that prevents overheating of the device without affecting the performance. Additionally, the company reassures that it will cover damages caused by overheating due to disabling the gaming optimizations under warranty.
Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a timeframe regarding the rollout of this much-needed update. Samsung only says that it will release the said update to the Galaxy S22 trio as well as other affected devices. Hopefully, users won’t have to wait much longer for that.