Geekbench delists four Galaxy S flagships because of Samsung's throttling behavior
Samsung was caught throttling more than 10,000 apps last week and the behavior has led to it being booted from the benchmarking platform Geekbench.
Samsung's Game Optimizing Service (GOS) app, which is only supposed to manage gaming apps to prevent overheating issues, was found to be limiting the performance of many popular non-gaming apps as well including Microsoft Office and Zoom.
The company conveniently left out the name of benchmarking apps like 3DMark and Geekbench from the list of apps that GOS has access to but when these were renamed, their results were also impacted. That means benchmarking tools were overestimating the real performance of some Samsung phones.
With the One UI 4.0 update, Samsung also made it hard for users to disable the GOS app, further adding to the frustration.
Samsung responded by clarifying that GOS optimizes CPU and GPU performance to prevent overheating during long gaming sessions and also said it would roll out a software update to let the users decide whether they want to enable or disable GOS. The company did not address the 6,800 non-gaming apps that were also impacted by GOS.
Whether or not you buy this reasoning is up to you, but Geekbench is not convinced. The platform has said that GOS was throttling applications on the basis of their identifiers and not behavior, and this is considered as a form of benchmark manipulation.
The last four Galaxy S series models - the Galaxy S22, Galaxy S21, Galaxy S20, and Galaxy S10 - were found to be using GOS and have thus been delisted from Geekbench.
We view this as a form of benchmark manipulation as major benchmark applications, including Geekbench, are not throttled by this service.
— Geekbench (@geekbench) March 4, 2022
This behavior is not uncommon among smartphone manufacturers. Just last year, the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro were removed from Geekbench for something similar. In 2017, it was reported that Apple was slowing down older iPhones with low-capacity batteries.
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