The IT Nerd

Earlier today I wrote a story about Samsung seemingly caught throttling apps. At the time I said this:

Clearly Samsung is aware how bad this looks. And I for one will be very interested in what they have to say on this as this is not a good look for Samsung.

Android Authority is now reporting that Samsung is seemingly admitting that they throttle apps. But this admission is very nuanced:

A list of 10,000 affected apps was posted online, with claims that Samsung was using its Game Optimizing Service (GOS) to facilitate throttling in these programs. Now, the Korean manufacturer has responded to the allegations, seemingly confirming the behavior and saying that changes were afoot.

“The GOS of the Samsung Galaxy S22 series is preloaded with our app that optimizes CPU and GPU performance to prevent excessive heat during long gameplay,” read an excerpt of a machine-translated notice posted by Samsung on its Members app (h/t: TechM and Dohyun Kim on Twitter).

“In order to meet the needs (sic), the Game Booster lab in the Game Launcher app will soon implement a software update that provides a performance priority option.”

But Android Authority points out the very thing that I was thinking when I read this:

Crucially, the company doesn’t address the fact that benchmark apps were missing from the list and therefore not subjected to the same throttling restrictions. The exclusion of benchmark apps meant that you’d get results that were completely at odds with the real-world experience.

This really has the perception that Samsung got caught doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing. And this response from Samsung won’t help that perception.

This entry was posted on March 3, 2022 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.