Own a Galaxy smartphone? Samsung might be slowing it down without your permission

If you’ve noticed that your Samsung Galaxy smartphone isn’t feeling as snappy as you’d hoped, you’re not alone. It appears the South Korean technology giant is throttling some of its devices in a bid to help improve battery life – and stop the phones from getting too hot.

According to the team at Android Authority, Samsung is using a piece of software called Game Optimizing Service (GOS), which has the capability to reduce the performance of around 10,000 popular video apps. Some of the services believed be being targeted by the software include Instagram, Netflix, TikTok, Microsoft Office and a number of popular games.

Interestingly, Game Optimizing Service (GOS) is smart enough to never interfere with apps that show how well a phone is performing. GeekBench, for example, which allows users to see CPU and GPU speeds on the device isn’t affected by GOS. That means, when users measure the raw power available from their device, they’ll see the highest possible score …even if this power isn’t actually made available to popular apps like Netflix, Microsoft Office, and games.

Samsung is yet to confirm that it is actively slowing down your apps, but there are plenty of reports on Twitter and on forums claiming that devices aren’t running to their full potential. A Korean YouTuber has also posted a video that claims to show how bad the problem is.

By tricking the device into switching off GOS, games were able to run much faster with CPU and GPU speeds all increasing by a considerable margin. For example, the title Wild Life Extreme saw its benchmark score plummet from 2618 to 1141 once GOS was activated.

It’s not unusual for smartphone firms to monitor performance and some users might not mind this taking place if it extends battery life.

However, what is causing some concern is that Samsung appears to have activated GOS without telling anyone and isn’t giving users any way to switch it off. There’s also some confusion about which devices are actually being hit by this change with some reports suggesting that not Galaxy phones have GOS installed.

Samsung is yet to officially respond to the rumours although Android Authority is reporting that the company is looking into it and could make a statement soon.

If true, Samsung wouldn’t be the first to throttle apps without users knowing. In 2021, OnePlus was caught doing exactly the same with apps including Chrome, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Netflix all suffering from less than impressive speeds.

The company ended up admitting that it was throttling some phones with the Chinese firm saying it was to “improve the performance of the device for our users” and “improve the performance of the device for our users.”