Samsung is throttling the performance of over 10,000 apps

Samsung is the latest smartphone vendor to be caught using a list of apps that the operating system throttles automatically — and benchmarking apps are not on the list.

As reported by Android Authority, Korean Twitter users have compiled a list of 10,000 apps that are marked as subject to "performance limits" imposed by Samsung's Game Optimizing Service. Yet, despite being ostensibly related to games, the list of affected apps also includes Microsoft Office apps, Netflix, Google Keep, TikTok, among others.

This list also included certain Samsung apps, such as Samsung Cloud, and even the default phone dialer preloaded on Samsung phones.

Notably, benchmark apps such as GeekBench 5 and Antutu have not been throttled.

In a test by a Korean YouTuber, the creator renamed an otherwise-unaffected app to that that is listed as subject to performance limits. The benchmark registered a much lower performance score for the renamed app.

In his test, an unmodified app of Wild Life Extreme scored 2618, while the app with a spoofed package name that matched an app on the list to be optimized scored 56% worse, at 1141 points.

According to Twitter user GaryeonHan, Samsung employees believe that the intentional throttling is "bad behavior." They drew comparisons to the Volkswagen emissions scandal, where the German automaker had intentionally programed emissions controls to activate only upon emissions testing. The Twitter user has also claimed that Samsung's Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong has ordered an investigation into the issue.

There are two possibilities for the list. First, the company could use the list to keep battery drain down on some of the world's most popular apps, artificially inflating battery runtime tests performed by users and themselves for marketing purposes. Second, Samsung could also be attempting to game the benchmarking tests commonly performed on tests and not delivering that speed to all apps evenly.

The performance limits don't appear to be installed on phones in the Galaxy S22 line, and the Galaxy S20 FE and Galaxy S10e devices, Android Authority has observed. Rival smartphone manufacturer OnePlus had previously been caught "optimizing" apps that ultimately subjected them to poorer performance on certain OnePlus phones.

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16 Comments

sflocal 6133 comments · 16 Years

About 2 years ago

The way iKnockoff companies like Scamscum get away with this is disgusting. If this were Apple, guaranteed that the the botomfeeding lawyers, media, and iHaters would be screaming for Tim Cook's head, and clickbait YouTubers would fill the Internet with countless videos on how Apple is a "greedy" company and ripping off users.

anonconformist 200 comments · 9 Years

It will be interesting to see if they claim it’s for battery optimization and the reason why.

Truth of the matter is many applications are inefficient in how they’re designed to run, and burn through battery for no real good effect. As much as that’s true all too often, users should make such choices as to whether they get better battery life versus speed, and not let it be decided other than by themselves.

JustSomeGuy1 330 comments · 6 Years

If you look beyond the obvious "they're cheating" response, this opens up some fascinating questions.

*Why* are they doing this? The answer is a lot less obvious than you'd think. Benchmarking apps will use as much CPU as they can get their hands on, and so will obviously be affected by being on the list, but most of those 10,000 apps should not be. After all, MS Office, Netflix, Tiktok - generally speaking, none of them require full CPU utilization. They're just not doing that much work.

So why are they listed? DVFS should be enough to manage the CPU for all these apps! And even though the DVFS implementation on various Androids has sometimes been poor, it should still be better than the ridiculously blunt instrument this throttle is.

In fact, this throttle is likely bad for battery life in most cases. Race-to-idle is demonstrably the best way to go, in almost all cases. The only exception would be if the CPU were set to run so far off the optimal voltage that running at full speed was dramatically more expensive than executing the same number of cycles at lower speeds, which shouldn't be the case, except possibly for a couple of the recent Qualcomm chips (and I'm skeptical even for those). Even then the DVFS implementation would have to be totally broken.

The two major obvious exceptions to this general rule are benchmarks and graphics-intensive games. On PCs/Macs, you'd also include video editing and a few other things, but these are phones, so that's mostly not a thing. And those aren't going to be on the throttle list or the phone will show up as slow when tested. So... what's the throttle for? Can they have broken DVFS that badly?

This is really really weird.

Edited to add: I could imagine using this kind of tool to deal with very badly written apps that suck up all available CPU for no reason - say, an app with a busy idle loop. But there can't be that many of those.

rezwits 854 comments · 17 Years

Response to ABOVE ^^

BATTERY PERFORMANCE, period!

iyfcalvin 80 comments · 16 Years

sflocal said:

The way iKnockoff companies like Scamscum get away with this is disgusting. If this were Apple, guaranteed that the the botomfeeding lawyers, media, and iHaters would be screaming for Tim Cook's head, and clickbait YouTubers would fill the Internet with countless videos on how Apple is a "greedy" company and ripping off users.

If Apple did that, there’d be huge class action lawsuits lined up on Cook! 😂