Earlier this month, Geekbench delisted several Samsung Galaxy S series phones after they were found to limit the performance of more than 1,000 apps added to the Game Optimizing Service (GOS) list. Now it seems that Samsung is not the only brand doing this. Geekbench co-founder John Pool claims that Xiaomi makes “performance decisions based on app IDs.”
John claims in a series of tweets that Xiaomi is limiting device performance based on app names. John found that by disguising the Geekbench app as a popular game, Fortnite resulted in a 30% drop in single-core performance and a 15% drop in multi-core performance.
Xiaomi slows down the performance of its device, Geekbench developer claims
To test his claims, John used a Xiaomi Mi 11, where he first ran the Geekbench app normally, and the next time disguised the app as Fortnite. Single-core scores are down 30% and multi-core scores are down 15% after the Geekbench app was masked. The same thing happened when the Geekbench app was disguised as other games like Genshin Impact. As far as you understand, Xiaomi’s performance limiting app either improves performance when Geekbench is detected, or intentionally limits performance when any other app is detected. You can check the scores below.
Android Police tested this claim on the recently launched Xiaomi 12x and 12 Pro. They masked the Geekbench app with Netflix and Chrome showing poorer performance than what Genshin Impact showed.
| Geekbench Corporate | Genshin parody | Netflix parody | chrome fake | Play Market Geekbench | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Pro | 738/3148 | 1119/3468 | 733/3065 | 737/3071 | 1201/3394 |
| 12X | 712/3049 | 807/3314 | 708/3020 | 710/2973 | 978/3289 |
The publication notes that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-powered 12 Pro suffers more performance degradation than the Snapdragon 888-powered 12X.
Geekbench has confirmed to Android Police that it will start delisting Xiaomi phones this week. Here is the company’s full statement:
“It’s unfortunate to see another device manufacturer misleading consumers by degrading application performance but not benchmark performance. We are looking into which Xiaomi phones are affected and expect to start removing Xiaomi phones from the Android Benchmark later this week.”
This is not the first time that smartphone manufacturers have limited the performance of their devices. OnePlus, Samsung, and now Xiaomi have been added to the list. Xiaomi has not responded yet, but it would be interesting to see how the company defends this. It is still unclear if Xiaomi’s performance system detects the package name or simply observes performance over time and tries to limit its performance.