Yesterday, Samsung made headlines for what could have become a public relations disaster. The South Korean smartphone giant was caught restricting CPU resources available to everyday apps to prolong battery life. Now, it has owned up to the issue and promised to release an update that lets users manually disable optimizations.

To get you up to speed, around 10,000 apps could not use the flagship hardware in Samsung phones to the fullest because of a software utility called Game Optimizing Service (GOS). The utility cannot be turned off, and in some cases, it causes a 50 percent performance hit in the running apps.

Samsung has responded to the allegations in a post on the Samsung Members app. It says:

“The GOS of the Samsung Galaxy S22 series is preloaded with our app that optimizes CPU and GPU performance to prevent excessive heat during long gameplay.”

The company added that in the near future, it would provide a “performance priority option” toggle in the Game Booster lab of the Game Launcher app. The change will be rolled out to affected devices via a software update.

Afterward, we will try our best for customers' satisfaction and safety by listening to their opinions.

Thank You

— Dohyun Kim 𝕐 (@dohyun854) March 3, 2022

Note that Samsung specifically addressed the issue with Game Launcher and Game Booster on the Galaxy S22 series. We remain hopeful that it will roll out the fix for older affected Galaxy devices as well. The smartphone brand also refused to address why popular benchmarking apps such as GeekBench, Antutu, and PCMark were not subject to the restrictions.

By leaving the benchmark apps unrestricted by GOS, Samsung misled users and potential buyers that its Galaxy devices offered better performance than they did in the real world. Why do you think the company resorted to such measures? Tell us in the comments section below.