7 ms·

Samsung appears to be throttling 10k Android apps on Galaxy devices

91 points by marcodiego 5y ago

jcranberry 5y ago
What are the effects of these performance limits, aside from putatively increasing battery life?
- fulafel 5y ago
  If they did this in an above board way, this would be the default power profile in the OS/HW. Now they're charging users for high CPU performance, but only benchmark apps get to use it. It's a bait and switch where they try to fool people into thinking there's high performance at low power usage.
  - jcranberry 5y ago
    Are you sure its benchmarks which are the only apps which can use it? The idea of making a blacklist of apps which take up 100% of a CPU despite not needing it to function sounds like a good idea to me. Some games might do that by endlessly spinning rather than sleeping or something until the next time they need to process state/draw a frame etc. Benchmarks are obvious candidates not to put on such a list because when you use them taking up 100% performance is reasonable. So depending on the apps on the list I could see it being deceptive, or just curating a list of apps which weren't developed with power usage in mind.
tentacleuno 5y ago
OnePlus did this too[0]. They effectively skipped slowing down all apps which could be used for benchmarking. This was discovered by someone and it made major news headlines. [0]: https://www.androidauthority.com/oneplus-9-benchmarks-1640058/ https://www.androidauthority.com/oneplus-9-benchmarks-164005...
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Your link doesn't match what you are saying. Your link talked about a phone throttling popular apps which were marked as battery hogs to help conserve battery life.
  - marcelnita 5y ago
    Depends how you look at it. What can't be denied is that they removed the performance limitations for benchmarking apps and this is the real issue - you don't get that kind of performance in real life usage.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      It sounded like different apps were throttled different amounts which means that you need to measure the performance of different apps separately. If you wanted to throttle a benchmark, what level of throttling should it get?
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    >In testing, I had encountered something which really perplexed me, and caught my attention; seemingly inexplicable slow browser benchmark figures which were not in line with any other Snapdragon 888 device in the market, getting only a fraction of the scores and performance of other devices. We have detected that OnePlus is blacklisting popular applications away from the its fastest cores, causing slow down in typical workloads such as web browsing. We have confirmed that (a) benchmarks or (b) unknown apps get full performance; most of the top popular non-benchmark apps get notably reduced performance. This is perhaps to improve battery life at the expense of performance, but it does mean that the regular benchmark results are somewhat useless for user experience. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-examination https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-e...
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      There is a difference between benchmark apps being meaningless and cheating in benchmark apps. For example one HN user told a story of a magazine who benchmarked different compilers including this user's. This user's compiler recognized the benchmark code was dead code and just eliminated it where other compilers didn't. This magazine called him out for cheating and it hurt sales for his compiler. He didn't mean to cheat the benchmark. It's just that the benchmark being used in an outdated methodology for evaluating performance.
causi 5y ago
I don't know if it's the SoC or Android itself that's gotten so bad lately, but phones these days are exhibiting similar battery life to phones from years ago while having enormously larger batteries.
- boplicity 5y ago
  Not my experience; I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE. The battery regularly lasts 3 to 4 days with light usage. Something that was unheard of a few years ago. Of course, you can compare this to the pre smartphone era, where batteries often lasted a week, or longer, but that's not really a fair comparison.
  - aceazzameen 5y ago
    Do newer Samsung phones still have the ultra power saving mode? It used to convert the screen to greyscale, throttle CPU, disable all background services and apps, and useable only for phone calls, sms, and basic web browsing. It could last over a week.
    - Ourgon 5y ago
      > It could last over a week Install LineageOS but skip "GAPPS" (Google apps), don't install nosy background-active spyware like Facebook and its ilk and you should be able to easily go beyond 1 week on a device with a 4500mAH battery with "light usage". in full colour, with normal functionality. Standby time of up to a month (I got 21 days on a Motorola Defy with a 1700mAh battery), "normal" charge interval of twice per week with normal use. I would not buy a device which needs daily charging.
    - awiesenhofer 5y ago
      Yes they still do, without the greyscale as standard nowadays though. Its pretty great, you can "promote" 1-2 normal apps to work in that mode too. I used it heavily on trips where I only needed the camera and gmaps anyway - my trusty S10 lasted for days thanks to it.
  - causi 5y ago
smrtinsert 5y ago
I'm fine with this, battery life is outstanding lately. My major frustration with Android is Googles automated approach to everything. For that reason alone I'm considering moving back to ios after more than a decade.
mywacaday 5y ago
Also posted here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30542249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30542249
awiesenhofer 5y ago
After looking into it I don't get the outrage about it - it's a bog standard setting in the power settings. Here on my german phone it's called "Verarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit" (Processing Speed) under advanced power options. You can choose between optimized (standard), high and maximum. So sure, you can't disable the "Game Optimizing Service" app, and its set to optimized/throttled by default, but you can easily just set it to maximum (ie. disable throttling). I'd argue for 90% of customers slight throttling and better battery life is a good thing.
- quitit 5y ago
  Depends where you sit on the issue - when Apple used algorithms to throttle cpu spikes to prevent devices with older batteries from shutting down it led to a significant outcry and numerous lawsuits. The samsung profiles fit squarely in vanity: high benchmarking scores, but slower real world performance.
rolandog 5y ago
I did start to notice sluggishness since a week or two ago. Maybe they thought they could target S21 users to get them to buy an S22? I actually saved and shelled out for a S21 Ultra 5G thinking it would tolerate the bloat from modern apps for at least 3 years.

91 points by marcodiego 5y ago

jcranberry 5y ago

What are the effects of these performance limits, aside from putatively increasing battery life?

fulafel 5y ago
If they did this in an above board way, this would be the default power profile in the OS/HW. Now they're charging users for high CPU performance, but only benchmark apps get to use it. It's a bait and switch where they try to fool people into thinking there's high performance at low power usage.
- jcranberry 5y ago
  Are you sure its benchmarks which are the only apps which can use it? The idea of making a blacklist of apps which take up 100% of a CPU despite not needing it to function sounds like a good idea to me. Some games might do that by endlessly spinning rather than sleeping or something until the next time they need to process state/draw a frame etc. Benchmarks are obvious candidates not to put on such a list because when you use them taking up 100% performance is reasonable. So depending on the apps on the list I could see it being deceptive, or just curating a list of apps which weren't developed with power usage in mind.

tentacleuno 5y ago

OnePlus did this too[0]. They effectively skipped slowing down all apps which could be used for benchmarking. This was discovered by someone and it made major news headlines. [0]: https://www.androidauthority.com/oneplus-9-benchmarks-1640058/ https://www.androidauthority.com/oneplus-9-benchmarks-164005...

charcircuit 5y ago
Your link doesn't match what you are saying. Your link talked about a phone throttling popular apps which were marked as battery hogs to help conserve battery life.
- marcelnita 5y ago
  Depends how you look at it. What can't be denied is that they removed the performance limitations for benchmarking apps and this is the real issue - you don't get that kind of performance in real life usage.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    It sounded like different apps were throttled different amounts which means that you need to measure the performance of different apps separately. If you wanted to throttle a benchmark, what level of throttling should it get?
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >In testing, I had encountered something which really perplexed me, and caught my attention; seemingly inexplicable slow browser benchmark figures which were not in line with any other Snapdragon 888 device in the market, getting only a fraction of the scores and performance of other devices. We have detected that OnePlus is blacklisting popular applications away from the its fastest cores, causing slow down in typical workloads such as web browsing. We have confirmed that (a) benchmarks or (b) unknown apps get full performance; most of the top popular non-benchmark apps get notably reduced performance. This is perhaps to improve battery life at the expense of performance, but it does mean that the regular benchmark results are somewhat useless for user experience. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-examination https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-e...
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    There is a difference between benchmark apps being meaningless and cheating in benchmark apps. For example one HN user told a story of a magazine who benchmarked different compilers including this user's. This user's compiler recognized the benchmark code was dead code and just eliminated it where other compilers didn't. This magazine called him out for cheating and it hurt sales for his compiler. He didn't mean to cheat the benchmark. It's just that the benchmark being used in an outdated methodology for evaluating performance.

causi 5y ago

I don't know if it's the SoC or Android itself that's gotten so bad lately, but phones these days are exhibiting similar battery life to phones from years ago while having enormously larger batteries.

boplicity 5y ago
Not my experience; I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE. The battery regularly lasts 3 to 4 days with light usage. Something that was unheard of a few years ago. Of course, you can compare this to the pre smartphone era, where batteries often lasted a week, or longer, but that's not really a fair comparison.
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  Do newer Samsung phones still have the ultra power saving mode? It used to convert the screen to greyscale, throttle CPU, disable all background services and apps, and useable only for phone calls, sms, and basic web browsing. It could last over a week.
  - Ourgon 5y ago
    > It could last over a week Install LineageOS but skip "GAPPS" (Google apps), don't install nosy background-active spyware like Facebook and its ilk and you should be able to easily go beyond 1 week on a device with a 4500mAH battery with "light usage". in full colour, with normal functionality. Standby time of up to a month (I got 21 days on a Motorola Defy with a 1700mAh battery), "normal" charge interval of twice per week with normal use. I would not buy a device which needs daily charging.
  - awiesenhofer 5y ago
    Yes they still do, without the greyscale as standard nowadays though. Its pretty great, you can "promote" 1-2 normal apps to work in that mode too. I used it heavily on trips where I only needed the camera and gmaps anyway - my trusty S10 lasted for days thanks to it.
- causi 5y ago

smrtinsert 5y ago

I'm fine with this, battery life is outstanding lately. My major frustration with Android is Googles automated approach to everything. For that reason alone I'm considering moving back to ios after more than a decade.

mywacaday 5y ago

Also posted here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30542249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30542249

awiesenhofer 5y ago

After looking into it I don't get the outrage about it - it's a bog standard setting in the power settings. Here on my german phone it's called "Verarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit" (Processing Speed) under advanced power options. You can choose between optimized (standard), high and maximum. So sure, you can't disable the "Game Optimizing Service" app, and its set to optimized/throttled by default, but you can easily just set it to maximum (ie. disable throttling). I'd argue for 90% of customers slight throttling and better battery life is a good thing.

quitit 5y ago
Depends where you sit on the issue - when Apple used algorithms to throttle cpu spikes to prevent devices with older batteries from shutting down it led to a significant outcry and numerous lawsuits. The samsung profiles fit squarely in vanity: high benchmarking scores, but slower real world performance.

rolandog 5y ago

I did start to notice sluggishness since a week or two ago. Maybe they thought they could target S21 users to get them to buy an S22? I actually saved and shelled out for a S21 Ultra 5G thinking it would tolerate the bloat from modern apps for at least 3 years.