Samsung’s Vice Chairman and CEO, Jong-Hee Han, has issued an official and formal apology to Samsung users for throttling thousands of applications. The CEO issued the apology during a shareholders meeting, and Han said that Samsung would continue to “listen to customers more closely to prevent such an issue from happening again”.

The CEO said that “the Game Optimization Service (GOS) was designed to optimize smartphone performance during gaming“, and while it did do that to a certain extent, it throttled thousands of other applications to preserve battery life (via The Elec). As a result, flagship devices with high-end chipsets were underpowered, which could sometimes provide a slower than average performance. The problem was that users were not made aware of the “feature”, therefore it introduced a lot of controversies.

Once the GOS throttling behavior was discovered, Samsung rolled out an update that removed the performance limiter on the Galaxy S22 series and other devices, which were affected by the GOS software. It’s also worth noting that the GOS affected the performance of over 10,000 apps. GOS is the default application on all Samsung Galaxy S-series of flagship devices, and it comes pre-installed on all smartphones in all regions. Geekbench scores were also affected by the optimization, which is why the benchmark platform banned the last four generations of the Galaxy S-series of flagships and the recently announced Galaxy Tab S8 series of tablets.

If you haven’t updated your device yet or haven’t checked for an update, we recommend you go into your settings and see if you have an update waiting for you. As always, these updates could come with security patches, and it may take a few weeks until you receive it on your device.