Like Apple in the battery scandal, Samsung adds on the Galaxy S22 a setting to block performance limitations

Without prior notice, Samsung has introduced a hidden feature on Galaxy S22 phones, which limits the performance of its phones in over 10,000 Android applications.

Even before the launch of the Galaxy S22, there was information in the press that Samsung-AMD’s “friendship” for developing the Exynos 2200 chipset did not go well, the finished product having performance characteristics far below initial expectations, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 alternative handicap being both so much so that the Samsung developer also considered abandoning the pre-launch of the chipset, which would have involved the destruction of countless newly made Galaxy S22 and still out of the original packaging. Almost miraculously, sources began to circulate information that the launch of Samsung is going according to plan, the whole scandal that has never been made public is in fact an exaggeration.

To the relief of Samsung, the launch event was also flawless, with only isolated reports accusing aggressive and inexplicable slowdowns on some Galaxy S22 Ultra specs, which resolved themselves after a few days. It would have been nice if the post-launch surprises had stopped here. However, inevitably, users have noticed that some games and applications run inexplicably slower on the Galaxy S22 than on some rival devices.

In a short time, independent tests have shown that Samsung systematically limits performance in almost any common application, except the official benchmarks. Thus, the performance of no less than 10,000 of the most used Android applications is in fact artificially limited, without the knowledge of Samsung fans who have paid substantial sums for the preferred S22 version.

Officially, everything is in fact an “optimization” initiative launched by Samsung, in order to deliver optimized performance to users, in the conditions of low battery consumption and temperature problems.

Specifically, independent users of Galaxy S22 smartphones have found that the service called Game Optimizing Service (GOS) is responsible not only for improving performance in games, but also for limiting the performance of the phone in other applications, whether or not it runs games. According to Twitter user GaryeonHan, GOS includes a list of over 10,000 applications in which phones cannot use their full processing power.

The list also includes well-known applications such as YouTube Vanced, Strava, foodpanda, Microsoft Office, LinkedIn or Zoom. The problem is that Samsung software does not mention performance limitation in any way, much less the reasons why such “optimizations” are needed on top-of-the-range phones.

Realizing that the “omission” does not only bring a blur of image that is difficult to erase, but also an ideal argument for lawsuits completed by awarding costly damages, Samsung is preparing, following the Apple model, the introduction of a setting that allows bypassing the artificially introduced limitation .

However, it remains to be seen whether, after checking the setting that guarantees the level of performance promised from the very beginning by the manufacturer, Samsung phones will have only a minor degradation of battery life, or other symptoms. For example, turning off the phone with an overheating message after a few minutes in your favorite game. While not an excuse for Samsung, the issue has already been documented on Xiaomi 12 series phones, pointing the blame to the current generation of high-end chipsets, which simply do not live up to expectations.

Thus, in order to get rid of the performance slowdowns “at your own risk”, you only need to adjust the Game Performance Management Mode option, available in the Game Booster section of the Settings menu.