Gerry Palmers Tech 03.05.2022 00:Mar AM EST

Samsung Gets Benched: GeekBench Just Banned Samsung Over Shady Throttling

Responding to reports that Samsung is throttling its devices when users play popular gaming titles, while leaving out benchmarking apps in its Game Optimizing Service (GOS), Geekbench is set to penalize and "bench" a number of the tech giant's devices.

Samsung Galaxy S22 Line, Other Devices Delisted; Galaxy Note, A-series Unaffected

Geekbench revealed to Android Police that it plans to delist Samsung's Galaxy S22 series from its Geekbench Browser effective Friday, together with the leading smartphone maker's S21, S20, and S10 devices. The delisting, however, will not affect the Galaxy Note and the A-series phones, as they have not shown any indication that they were limiting the performance of installed apps.

This comes after the One UI 4 software on the OnePlus was caught throttling the performance of thousands of apps to make it appear that the device was in peak performance and with enhanced battery life. And just like what a Korean YouTuber experimented with, renaming a benchmark app with "Genshin Impact" led to reduced performance, Android Police further confirmed.

Geekbench said in a statement that it views such action "as a form of benchmark manipulation" given that major benchmark apps, such as Geekbench, "are not throttled by this service."

Samsung has vowed to release an update adding the ability to directly control gaming performance. But Geekbench intends to have such devices with manipulated benchmarking delisted permanently, even with a just-released patch that addresses the issue. As such, none of the affected Samsung phones will be relisted on the Geekbench site.

Samsung did not offer a timeframe on the availability of this update.

Geekbench did the same direct action to OnePlus phones last year, delisting the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro from its benchmark browser for app throttling while excluding benchmarking apps.

On Wednesday, Twitter users posted a list of 10,000 apps under the GOS that were subject to performance degradation, which left device owners fuming.

GOS List Covers Gaming Titles, Non-Gaming Apps, Samsung Services, Shows Misleading Benchmark Figures

The list covers not only games but a number of prominent non-gaming apps, such as Microsoft Office, Netflix, Google Keep, and TikTok, and Samsung services and apps, such as the Samsung Cloud, Samsung Pass, Samsung Pay, Secure Folder, and the dialer. On the other hand, benchmark apps, such as GeekBench 5, are not on the list.

The GOS is a pre-installed app on some Galaxy phones and can't be disabled, 9to5Google noted in a post. While the purpose of the GOS has not been explicitly described, its name would mean it was to enhance game performance.

Although balancing the performance and battery life of installed apps is ideal, such throttling appears to be a disservice to users expecting the best performance from their devices and the apps, notably the gaming packages. And since the benchmark apps are not part of the list, it reveals a manipulative effort to show misleading figures about device performance, shortchanging users.