Samsung may be slowing down your apps - Here's why
The latest smartphones are no match for previous models, as the technology makes them faster and more powerful. Millions of people worldwide upgrade their mobile devices to the newest available to benefit from these improvements.
When your phone has the latest processing chip, you don’t expect it to perform worse than what the specifications imply. Unfortunately, that is what many Samsung users have come to realize.
Read on to see why thousands of popular apps are seemingly throttled and what you can do about it.
Here’s the backstory
If you bought a smartphone over the last few years, you should have a general idea of its capabilities. At the very least, it should be able to run relatively complex applications without problems and play mobile games at a high resolution without difficulties.
That’s why, for many Samsung Galaxy S22 users, it seems strange that thousands of apps suffer from performance issues. But it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, as mobile phone makers have in the past limited how some apps operate to save on battery life.
Still, Samsung forums have recently been inundated with complaints. As many as 10,000 apps are reportedly not working to their full potential. Some of the apps that have been complained about include:
- Microsoft’s Office apps
- Netflix
- Google Keep
- TikTok
- Secure Folder
- Samsung Cloud, Pay and Pass
- Telegram
- Skype
- Waze
- Microsoft Teams
- Facebook Lite
- Door Dash
- Candy Crush Saga
- Clash of Clans
- Fortnite
- Deer Hunt 2
A Twitter user did some digging and realized that Samsung’s built-in Game Optimizing Service (GOS) app might be to blame. When an app is included in the GOS list, it is supposed to run smoother, but as pointed out by many others, GOS has the opposite effect.
What you can do about it
Samsung explained that GOS is there “for optimizing the CPU and GPU performance” so that the device doesn’t overheat when games or apps are used for a long time. It comes pre-installed on many Samsung devices and can’t be removed.
After many complaints, the tech giant released a short statement acknowledging the issues. While it didn’t provide a solution, Samsung plans to “update the Game Booster lab to provide an option to prioritize the performance.”
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