A few years ago, overheating the Samsung Galaxy Note became life-threateningly dangerous. The Galaxy Note series was exploding. This problem arose because the Note had a bigger battery and was becoming too hot. Samsung was forced to recall all their Galaxy Notes, and later, they scrubbed the phone series altogether.
For a long time, one of the most critical flaws of Samsung Phones is that it overheats. It has been known since 2010. Unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t taken any practical steps to address this issue.
Samsung phones overheat because of Android OS and poor software optimization, bloatware apps and services, and inferior hardware optimization, especially the Exynos processor.
Galaxy Phones OS is inherently problematic:
Google, Apple, Microsoft are software companies. Samsung, on the other hand, is primarily a hardware company. Samsung develops software when it’s necessary to control that hardware.
Samsung phones use Google’s Android operating system. Samsung simply optimizes it for their Galaxy series. However, as they don’t have a strong software team to optimize it efficiently, android OS performs poorly on their hardware.
Furthermore, Android is made with Java programming language. While it’s easy to use and code with Java, it has a terrible reputation for poor performance. Java requires a lot of RAM and processing power. Without robust hardware, Java-based Android runs sluggishly. It’s why an iPhone can achieve more with 1GB RAM while an android phone needs 4GB RAM.
More RAM and more processing mean more power consumption on the phone. This consumed power is dissipated as heat. It’s one reason why the Samsung phone overheats.
Poor Software Optimization:
Samsung is not new to the smartphone market. Before android phones, Samsung used to make feature phones. However, at that time, Nokia was the phone leader.
Before 2010, Samsung’s feature phones were terrible too. Their OS was awful, buggy, and laggy. Samsung tried hard but failed to take on Nokia. Therefore, when they first saw the opportunity with Android, they started working on Samsung Galaxy phones around 2010. As Nokia and BlackBerry hesitated to make smartphones, Samsung rose to popularity.
The software engineers who were responsible for the terrible Samsung feature phone OS started working on Samsung Galaxy phones. Therefore, it’s no wonder the Samsung Galaxy phone’s OS is awful. The early Galaxy phones were not good. Their performance only improved when Google improved the main Android OS.
On several occasions, Samsung tried to create their mobile operating system, once with BADA and once with Tizen. Both failed miserably. Even though Samsung uses the Tizen OS in some TVs and wearables, Samsung abandoned Tizen for phones entirely. Developers and security researchers have shown that Tizen is a terribly coded mobile OS. It proves that Samsung’s software expertise is limited.
Samsung is a top-down manager-driven organization. Software engineers do whatever they are asked to do. They are evaluated based on the number of achieved goals, such as fixing software bugs, developing phone features, etc. Nowhere in the software department is an engineer awarded for writing a beautiful and efficient piece of code. Good software writing culture doesn’t exist in Samsung.
As a result, the Samsung Galaxy phone’s Android OS is a mess. It’s full of redundant, unnecessary code bloatware. An inefficient code consumes more energy and overheats the phone.
Poorly Designed Processor:
Even though Samsung is known for excellent displays, memory, and other hardware, Samsung is not well known for its processor design.
Intel, Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung all design processors. But even Intel and Qualcomm can’t compete with Apple-designed processors.
A PC comes with a processor cooling mechanism, especially the gaming PCs. It’s because a GPU and CPU are the primary heat-generating source.
However, on the phone, other than a heatsink, no air or liquid cooling is possible. Therefore, a better optimized and designed processor is essential.
Numerous tests have shown that Samsung-designed Exynos processors are terrible at performance and power consumption. As these processors consume more power and are inefficient, they generate more heat and make the Samsung Galaxy phone hot.
Bloatware Apps:
If a user buys a Google Pixel or an iPhone, it comes with only the required apps. And most of the time, those apps can be removed. However, Samsung is different.
Each Samsung phone comes preloaded with numerous redundant and 3rd Party Apps. For example, on the Samsung Galaxy phones, these are a few redundant apps –
Browser:
- Samsung Browser
- Google Chrome
Storage:
- Google Drive
- Microsoft One Drive
Email Client:
- Samsung Email
- Gmail
App Store:
- Google Play Store
- Samsung App Store
There are numerous other redundant apps.
Moreover, each Samsung comes with numerous 3rd party apps such as Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn, etc.
These apps consume critical user space and hog critical phone resources in the background. For example, Facebook runs several services in the background at all times. Those services can track users and their behavior, which is a privacy violation and a critical security flaw. These apps consume battery and memory to run unnecessary tasks.
It’s why when a user browses, watches YouTube videos, or records videos with the camera app; the phone becomes hot because these tasks are pushing the phone to the edge.
It’s not uncommon for Samsung phone’s batteries to drain overnight. Unfortunately, whatever a user does, they can’t fix this issue. No solution that exists on the internet would work. It’s because the Samsung phone is running various services in the background and consuming battery. Therefore, it’s beyond the user’s control.
Global Position System (GPS):
There are many differences between Samsung Galaxy phones and an iPhone. One difference in functionality is the control of GPS.
On an iPhone, a user can’t manually turn on or off the GPS. The phone controls it automatically. A user can only control which apps have location permission.
On a Samsung Phone, a user controls the GPS. When it is turned on, every app that is registered to GPS services gets GPS data.
In hindsight, it seems Samsung’s GPS implementation is superior to the iPhone, but in reality, it’s not.
Samsung uses Google-made Android OS. In the android system, not only can the user turn on-off GPS, but the core android system can control the GPS too. This background operation also uses the phones battery, drains them, and makes a Samsung phone hot.
