Most modern Galaxy phones from Samsung have a piece of software installed called Game Optimization Service (GOS). The name makes it sound like something that raises the performance of games, but in fact it is used to lower the performance of over 10,000 apps including popular apps like Tiktok, Netflix and Microsoft Office.
The discovery was made by Korean users on the forum Meeco, and has been reported by, among others XDA Developers.
The list also includes apps from Samsung itself, but no benchmark apps that get free rein. One of the users who made the discovery has in a Youtube clip shown how much effect GOS has, by changing the name of the benchmark test 3D Mark to “Genshin Impact”, one of the games whose performance is stifled by the software.
With its common name, 3D Mark gives 2,618 points in the Wild Life Extreme test. With the fake name, the result is instead 1,141 points – less than half as high performance.
Samsung acknowledges that GOS slows down the speed of cpu and gpu, and says in a statement that the purpose of the software is to “optimize cpu and gpu performance to avoid overheating during long gaming sessions”. The company promises an update that will make it possible to opt out of this “optimization”.
It’s all reminiscent of when users discovered that Apple was strangling the speed of the processor in Iphone phones with worn batteries, the so-called “Batterygate” scandal.
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