Last week, we learned that Samsung, one of the main Korean chaebols, limits the performance of more than 10,000 applications on its various smartphones. Performance relative to big popular games like Candy Crush, Clash Royale, TikTok or Netflix.
In these different applications, the performance of the smartphone would be halved compared to the application which would not be affected by this limitation. According to the first findings, it will be the Samsung Game Optimizing Service protocol which limits the power of the smartphone on nearly 10,000 precisely selected games and applications.
Called for clarification, the Korean manufacturer finally published a page on its website this week detailing how the game optimization service works on the Samsung Galaxy S22. According to this FAQ, Game Opimizing Service (GOS) is a service that measures the state of the phone and provides optimal performance to avoid lags, excessive performance degradation, or excessive power consumption when playing games.
Restrictions that only apply to mobile games
Thus, according to the Korean manufacturer, GOS only slows down mobile games and not traditional applications. “GOS aims to improve product safety by limiting heating when the device is running a high-end game, and is not used for non-gaming applications,” reads the said FAQ.
Samsung claims that said list of 10,000 applications has “nothing to do” with GOS: “This list is intended to quickly determine whether a new installed application is a game or not”, noting that while benchmarks are not affected by this limitation performance of smartphones is that it is not regarding mobile games, but regarding classic applications.
The Korean manufacturer also specifies that its GOS functionality has been available on its smartphones since 2016. However, certain updates have restricted the possibilities for users to circumvent this software limitation. “We are studying the possibility of allowing the bypass of this blocking once more”, concludes Samsung.
