Samsung caught secretly throttling the OS - possibly for benchmark purposes...

[TiggrToo]

Samsung caught throttling 10,000 phone apps—and its own home screen

Samsung’s “Game Optimizing Service” throttles just about every app you can think of.

arstechnica.com

I remember the anger here when Apple did this to help the battery.

If Samsung were excluding benchmark apps then one can't help but ask: "was this done to artificially inflate benchmark scores"?

If so then ten times worse than Apple's stupidity. Least they had a good reason - they just didn't tell anyone at the time (which was just damn foolish on their part on my opinion).

 

[AustinIllini]

I wasn't mad when Apple did it and I'm neither mad nor surprised Samsung is doing it.

It's actually more impressive how Samsung is doing it when you consider how bloated and nasty the underlying Android codebase is.

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

Damn near all manufacturers have been caught cheating on benchmarks.

The difference with Apple was, users actually felt the different.

 

[jamezr]

Samsung caught throttling 10,000 phone apps—and its own home screen

Samsung’s “Game Optimizing Service” throttles just about every app you can think of.

arstechnica.com

I remember the anger here when Apple did this to help the battery.

If Samsung were excluding benchmark apps then one can't help but ask: "was this done to artificially inflate benchmark scores"?

If so then ten times worse than Apple's stupidity. Least they had a good reason - they just didn't tell anyone at the time (which was just damn foolish on their part on my opinion).

These are 2 different issues. Apple did it to cover up a defective aging battery that spurred people to upgrade their phones and made them millions of dollars. They denied doing this until people had documented proof and filed a class action suit.
This was planned absolencence on Apple part to make them money! They slowed down the whole phone!

Samsung is slowing down applications to save battery life. This by design to help prolong battery life. It does not slow down the whole phone and Samsung is upfront about it. You could even call it AI that runs in the background.

Then every phone maker has a process that puts applications to sleep in the background so they do not take up system resources and saves battery life. This is similar. apple does this too.

These are 2 different issues

 

[TiggrToo]

Samsung is slowing down applications to save battery life

1) Did they tell anyone before this was discovered? Nope. Nor did Apple.
2) Why exclude Benchmark applications?
3) Samsung have since said this has nothing to do with battery life and everything to do with helping games performance. If you don't play games though you're STILL being effected.
4) Now this has been discovered, Samsung have said they'll be offering an update to turn this off.
5) When Apple did this it was only enabled when the battery had reached a set level of degradation - this setting was enabled for everyone.

Good grief, quit trying to make excuses for Samsung. Just like Ono Plus last year, and Apple before them, Samsung got caught out. Quit cheerleafing for them and creating a fictional narrative that has no basis of truth..

Slowing down everything EXCEPT for benchmarking apps is totally dishonest.

 

[SteveJUAE]

Yep not even related to Apple sham

It seems users are also getting confused over what popular benchmark apps are all about especially as they are seldom if ever officially endorsed by OEM's as representative metrics etc

The IRL experiences are expressed by many reviews and postings here so I do not see any issues from that perspective especially as the actual optimisation occurring is not known for each app. If anything this shows how useless benchmark score really are vs actual/IRL usage

The only thing I see in true Android style is the user choice of being able to toggle some preferences of GOS is missing for those that want to fiddle

 

[LFC2020]

Good grief, quit trying to make excuses for Samsung. Just like Ono Plus last year, and Apple before them, Samsung got caught out. Quit cheerleafing for them and creating a fictional narrative that has no basis of truth..

Slowing down everything EXCEPT for benchmarking apps is totally dishonest.

Agree. 🤦‍♂️

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1499164100735422465

 

[jamezr]

1) Did they tell anyone before this was discovered? Nope. Nor did Apple.
2) Why exclude Benchmark applications?
3) Samsung have since said this has nothing to do with battery life and everything to do with helping games performance. If you don't play games though you're STILL being effected.
4) Now this has been discovered, Samsung have said they'll be offering an update to turn this off.
5) When Apple did this it was only enabled when the battery had reached a set level of degradation - this setting was enabled for everyone.

Good grief, quit trying to make excuses for Samsung. Just like Ono Plus last year, and Apple before them, Samsung got caught out. Quit cheerleafing for them and creating a fictional narrative that has no basis of truth..

Slowing down everything EXCEPT for benchmarking apps is totally dishonest.

Good grief stop trying to make excuses for Apple.

These 2 issue are not even close to being the same.
Apple throttle millions of phones at the hardware level to avoid a massive recall for failing batteies!
The battery failures would have randomly shutdown phones. To avoid this issue they covered it up by throttling phones.
So instead of costing Apple millions to replace failing batteries they covered it up.
This lead people to buy new phones because the WHOLE phone was slowed down. Not just a few applications...the whole phone!
Apple ended up making millions because the Apple failthful just bought new phones instead.
Then apple denied doing this at first. That is until people had proof. Then only after there was a class action alwsuit and Apple settled.

Is your brand loyalty blinding you to those simple well proven facts?




"Slowing down everything EXCEPT for benchmarking apps is totally dishonest."
^^^^^^^^ I toitally agree with you on this^^^^^

But it doesn't come anywhere close to what Apple did.......

 

[TiggrToo]

Good grief stop trying to make excuses for Apple.

These 2 issue are not even close to being the same.
Apple throttle millions of phones at the hardware level to avoid a massive recall for failing batteies!
The battery failures would have randomly shutdown phones. To avoid this issue they covered it up by throttling phones.
So instead of costing Apple millions to replace failing batteries they covered it up.
This lead people to buy new phones because the WHOLE phone was slowed down. Not just a few applications...the whole phone!
Apple ended up making millions because the Apple failthful just bought new phones instead.
Then apple denied doing this at first. That is until people had proof. Then only after there was a class action alwsuit and Apple settled.

Is your brand loyalty blinding you to those simple well proven facts?




"Slowing down everything EXCEPT for benchmarking apps is totally dishonest."
^^^^^^^^ I toitally agree with you on this^^^^^

But it doesn't come anywhere close to what Apple did.......

Let's see. Samsung were slowing down most apps for no good reason.

How is that not bad? And if it's not bad then why are Samsung promising to change the behavior AFTER it became public?

Apple screwed up big time when they did this. Ssmsung have also screwed up.

 

[jamezr]

Let's see. Samsung were slowing down most apps for no good reason.

How is that not bad? And if it's not bad then why are Samsung promising to change the behavior AFTER it became public?

Apple screwed up big time when they did this. Ssmsung have also screwed up.

you need a reality check......slowing down apps.....and you can stop it from doing it.
Then samsung as said they will push out a software update to stop doing this. all on their own.

For Apple it took a massive class action lawsuit that lasted for months and months and them denying it.
apple denied throttling phones even after there was proof they were doing it.

Then to be honest here we WANT comanies to slow down applications and put them to sleep in the background to save battery life. This is called AI learning and optimization.


That is no where close to the same as what Apple did.

 

[TiggrToo]

you need a reality check......slowing down apps.....and you can stop it from doing it.
Then samsung as said they will push out a software update to stop doing this. all on their own.

For Apple it took a massive class action lawsuit that lasted for months and months and them denying it.
apple denied throttling phones even after there was proof they were doing it.

Then to be honest here we WANT comanies to slow down applications and put them to sleep in the background to save battery life. This is called AI learning and optimization.


That is no where close to the same as what Apple did.

Again, you're making excuses for Samsung.

Both were deplorable actions.

 

[koigirl]

I remember buying a new phone bc mine was so dang slow. When all I needed to spend $$ on was a new battery.

 

[jamezr]

I remember buying a new phone bc mine was so dang slow. When all I needed to spend $$ on was a new battery.

yeah Apple agreed to replace batteries after the class action lawsuit. But by then most people did what you did...they just upgraded to a new iPhone. I did the same thing too!

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

Again, you're making excuses for Samsung.

Both were deplorable actions.

Let's be real here. Your OP stated "ten times worse than Apple's stupidity. Least they had a good reason".

Which I highly disagree with, cause user experience doesn't seem to be affected. Apple's slow down was very noticeable by the user.

 

[exoticSpice]

Let's be real here. Your OP stated "ten times worse than Apple's stupidity. Least they had a good reason".

Which I highly disagree with, cause user experience doesn't seem to be affected. Apple's slow down was very noticeable by the user.

the GOS slow down is noticeable in games. Samsung have said it lowers FPS by 10FPS.

 

[TiggrToo]

Let's be real here. Your OP stated "ten times worse than Apple's stupidity. Least they had a good reason".

Which I highly disagree with, cause user experience doesn't seem to be affected. Apple's slow down was very noticeable by the user.

It's not the slowdown that's dishonest. It's the lack of knowledge coupled with the exception made for Benchmarking apps that's dishonest.

It's akin to VW falsifying efficiency results. Samsung users were NOT getting the performance the benchmark apps indicated.

If this was not a big deal then why are Samsung backtracking now it's out in the open?

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

It's not the slowdown that's dishonest. It's the lack of knowledge coupled with the exception made for Benchmarking apps that's dishonest.

It's akin to VW falsifying efficiency results. Samsung users were NOT getting the performance the benchmark apps indicated.

If this was not a big deal then why are Samsung backtracking now it's out in the open?

I agree 100%. But like others have mentioned, this is completely different from Apple's slowdown.

 

[now i see it]

Not really. Both companies were trying to pull a “fast” one on their customers.

 

[ian87w]

This probably shows how bad the SD8gen1 and Exynos 2100 are in terms of performance per watt. That might be alluded to the cores themselves (the new cortex cores), or the Samsung fab (which is what Qualcomm used this time for the SD8gen1).

Remember the iPhone 6s, where Apple had the A9 fabbed by both TSMC and Samsung, and the Samsung version has worse battery life? Now add that to the fact that Qualcomm has been on the wrong trajectory for efficiency in the past few years, it makes sense that OEMs would be force to do something to prevent overheating.

 

[Lobwedgephil]

Honestly to me, benchmarks are extremely overrated these days. I care much more about smoothness and battery life these days, all of the top phones are fast enough.

 

[Klyster]

Oh that's just disgusting behavior from Samsung, I'm not going to open my new S22 Ultra until tomorrow now!

That'll show them what for.

 

[Oohara]

Personally I find it exceptionally unlikely that any tech giant would be more or less ethical than another.

 

[deckard666]

They seem to attract a lot more criminal cases compared to a lot of other tech giants….I suppose these things tricke through organisations.

 

[Motionblurrr]

So let me get this straight,

Samsung caps the performance of a brand new $1,200 flagship smartphone, right out of the box? They do this by having an extensive list of apps that they limit? The only apps that aren’t capped/on that list, are the benchmark testing apps…so they can just let the chip go full throttle only on those apps… so the benchmark numbers stay near max performance so it looks good?

LMAO.

How could anybody defend this? You’re getting 2017 performance out of a brand new chip, that apparently overheats too much and uses too much battery if that toggle isn’t on forcefully in the background.

Instead of developing and investing money to find a better way to do thermal management, they are doing cost cutting by limiting the performance of their CPUs right out of the box by using their ‘GOS software’.

That’s wonderful.

Mid-range performance at a flagship price, you gotta love Samsung! And their fans that eat this up.

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

So let me get this straight,

Samsung caps the performance of a brand new $1,200 flagship smartphone, right out of the box? They do this by having an extensive list of apps that they limit? The only apps that aren’t capped/on that list, are the benchmark testing apps…so they can just let the chip go full throttle only on those apps… so the benchmark numbers stay near max performance so it looks good?

LMAO.

How could anybody defend this? You’re getting 2017 performance out of a brand new chip, that apparently overheats too much and uses too much battery if that toggle isn’t on forcefully in the background.

Instead of developing and investing money to find a better way to do thermal management, they are doing cost cutting by limiting the performance of their CPUs right out of the box by using their ‘GOS software’.

That’s wonderful.

Mid-range performance at a flagship price, you gotta love Samsung! And their fans that eat this up.

Exaggeration much? Throttled or not, my S22 Ultra is still the fastest phone I've ever had, and I haven't even tried performance settings yet. Is Samsung dead wrong, YES!!!! But 2017 performance? Come on now.