Is Samsung the latest Android device maker throttling apps?

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The performance of thousands of popular apps may be slowed down by software that appears to be artificially limiting. Reports about the behavior have been gathering steam on social media.

Game Optimizing Service (GOS) is said to be slowing the performance of 10,000 apps. This list includes popular apps, as well as the own apps of the company. It doesn't appear to include benchmarking apps like 3DMark and GeekBench, which means they might not give an accurate picture of the performance of a phone. When you use an app like TikTok, you might not get the full performance you expect, even though a benchmarking app will run just fine.

A test done by a Korean YouTuber shows the impact this can have. They were able to trick the phone into being throttled by changing the name of the benchmarking app to Genshin Impact.

Which phones have this Game Optimizing Service is not known at the moment. The software was found on the S21 Plus, but it wasn't found on the S22 devices, the S20 FE, or the S10E. The software was installed on the S22 Plus. The software appears to be running on the S22 Ultra.

If the story of an Android device maker slowing app performance sounds familiar to you, that could be because it happened to them last year, where they diverted popular apps away from its phone processor. Users were annoyed that they weren't told about the decision up front, even though it was justified by the company.

It seems likely that the Game Optimizing Service is meant to improve battery life, though it is not yet known what it is meant to achieve. Why users aren't given the option of disabling the behavior is not clear.