Without a doubt, the biggest topic in the first half of 2022 in the global mobile phone market would be the Samsung GOS issue. Maybe you haven’t heard of it, but this has definitely become a hot potato in the cell phone market. What is GOS and why is this becoming an issue that is shaking the industry?

GOS, short for ‘Game Optimizing Service’, is one of the built-in services installed in every Samsung mobile phone. First installed in the ‘Galaxy S7’ series in 2016, it optimizes the phone in order to prevent overheating or excessive power consumption when you play a heavy, or high-resource-using, mobile game on the phone. How does it optimize the phone? Surprisingly, by downgrading the phone’s performance. Even though Samsung managed to equip its latest phones with the highest-quality CPUs, it seems that it could not solve the overheating problem that arises when CPUs are operating at their maximum point. So, instead of trying to solve the problem fundamentally by revising the phone’s hardware, such as by including a component that could cool the inner part of the phone or by changing the CPU to a more stable one that has fewer heating issues, Samsung put GOS in its software to limit the phones’ performance in advance of overheating.

This issue had initially been discovered a few years ago by some users who enjoyed playing mobile games on their Samsung phones. A lot of these gamers were using Samsung’s flagship phones, which were the ones with the most advanced features in the series released that year. However, they started to question whether they were actually using those features because it seemed that the phones’ performance was not as satisfactory as they’d anticipated with the specs stated by the company. Around that time, tech bloggers and YouTubers began posting results of what they had gotten from testing the phone’s performance manually with measuring applications, and it became clear that the phones were not performing at their best ability.

Soon, the users found ways to turn off GOS with other third-party applications and then were able to use their phones without any hindrance. However, as Samsung released the new series in 2022 and the phones’ software, Android, upgraded to version 12.0, those roundabout ways to turn off GOS were blocked by Samsung. Now all Samsung phones were under its control all the time. GOS lowered the number of frames per second and the clock frequency of the phone’s GPU and CPU. Easily put, it deliberately undermined the ability of the phone. Accordingly, users were only able to play games with lower resolution and slower speed on their phones.

It was also revealed that GOS also takes action when other utility applications were carried out on the phone. These applications included even default camera apps, and there were more than 10,000 of them in total. This meant that it also affected all the light users, who were not playing games or running heavy applications on their phones. What is worse, it was disclosed that GOS was turned off when a measurement program for gauging the phone’s performance was running on the phone.

A company named Geekbench measures phones’ performance by running its own benchmark program on the devices. It makes a credible list of the results of the measurement of numerous mobile phone models made by Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc. Since GOS was turned off when the benchmarking program was in use, the measurement was not accurately accessing the phone’s performance when users were actually using them. After the news broke, Geekbench removed benchmarks of all models from the Samsung Galaxy series (launched from 2018 to 2022) from its library, explaining that Samsung’s behavior is viewed as “benchmark manipulation”.

In the beginning, when this issue came under the spotlight, a marketing employee from Samsung said in an interview that it has no plan to modify GOS “because there would be no compromise in terms of users’ safety”. This quibbling remark that appears to miss the point merely fueled this issue and made customers even angrier. When the situation got out of its control, the company issued apologies to its customers, and on the 10th of March 2022, it released a software update regarding GOS. Roundabout ways to turn off GOS were allowed. Initial performance control of the CPU and the GPU when executing games was lifted. However, control behaviors depending on the device’s temperature will be kept.

Regardless of this update, it seems it is too late to appease its customers. They have already been let down by how the company concealed its constraint on the phones’ performance and how it initially dealt with this issue. The fact that Samsung tried to hide its shortcomings using GOS will hit hard on its reputation and position in the industry. Since Samsung currently holds a dominant position in the mobile phone market, this hit will affect the whole market as well.

Kim Minji  minjifromseoul@gmail.com

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