The developers behind the popular benchmarking app Geekbench have delisted four generations of Samsung devices from the service.
The banned devices include the Galaxy S10, S20, S21, and S22 series of Samsung smartphones.
The ban is in response to the recent discovery that Samsung’s Game Optimizing Service (GOS) was throttling the performance of over 10,000 apps on its devices while excluding any benchmarking apps from being affected.
Users also discovered that they could not disable GOS from running, meaning they were not getting the same performance as benchmark tests indicated.
Today we delisted these handsets from the Android Benchmark chart on the Geekbench Browser.
— Geekbench (@geekbench) March 4, 2022
Korean Samsung owners and YouTubers discovered the GOS performance throttling and consequently released a list of approximately 10,000 affected apps, of which only a third were mobile games.
In modern smartphones, thermal throttling protects the device’s internal components from overheating when the processor in the device becomes dangerously hot.
However, this is not the case with Samsung’s GOS as it is set to throttle both CPU and GPU performance pre-emptively by using application identifiers (like the app’s name) instead of application behaviour (like the app utilising a large percentage of the CPU).
Even if Samsung releases a patch to fix the issue, Geekbench’s policy will prevent the devices from being relisted on its services.
This is not the first time a smartphone manufacturer has attempted to manipulate benchmarks using a similar method.
Back in July 2021, OnePlus was caught throttling common app performance on the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro, and these devices were consequently delisted from Geekbench.
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