samsung: Explained: What is app throttling that Samsung and OnePlus have apologised for to their customers – Times of India

Samsung chief has apologised over the recent controversy regarding the alleged performance manipulation in the newly launched Samsung Galaxy S22 series and Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 series. The company is accused of app throttling and due to this the flagship Samsung Galaxy S series smartphones were removed from the benchmark sites.
OnePlus was also accused of manipulating benchmarking scores by app throttling on OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro smartphones. As per the company, the move was intended to improve the devices’ battery life and heat management. The company said that it will add an ‘optimised mode’ toggle in Oxygen OS 12 to address throttling.
What is app throttling
In simple terms, app throttling means to deliberately reduce the performance of a particular app. The aim of the throttling performance of apps on a smartphone is to boost the gaming performance and battery life. In the reported cases, smartphone manufacturers were intentionally hampering the performance of the popular apps on Google Play Store such as Google, Chrome, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Zoom and several others.
Axing the performance of downloaded apps automatically helps the smartphones to improve the functionality of the native apps. It also helps to avoid any lags that users may experience while scrolling through the device’s user interface. As smartphones require less memory to run throttled apps, it has more memory left to boot up games and native apps quicker.
Reports suggest that Samsung’s Game Optimisation Service (GOS) software, that comes pre-installed on Samsung Galaxy S22 phones, inhibits the performance of more than 10,000 apps. Samsung has said that it will release a software update to offer a performance priority option in the game booster lab under the game launcher app.
When it comes to OnePlus, reports claim that the company was using an application detection mechanism which intentionally kept running popular apps in processor’s slower cores.