Samsung's latest software upgrade could mean Galaxy phones beat iPhones for gaming – but you can't get it yet

An image of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra from a hands-on event
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (Image credit: Future / Roland Moore-Colyer)

  • Samsung launches a new Game Booster+ tool
  • Extra options include GPU tweaks and app categorization
  • For now at least, it's limited to South Korea

When it comes to the best gaming phones available at any given time, you'll usually find multiple Galaxy phones and iPhones vying to come out on top – and with a new software update, Samsung might just have edged ahead overall.

As spotted by SamMobile, there's now a new Game Booster+ app available as part of the Good Lock suite of utilities that comes with every Samsung Galaxy phone. It adds some useful improvements for the gaming experience on these handsets.

You can, for example, mark any app as a game and get the optimized gaming mode for it, as well as remap the keys on a connected controller. You're able to set up four different controller profiles for four separate games, if needed.

The update also enables you to dig deeper into the graphics settings for your phone, taking more control over how game demands are handled. These options include improving texture quality, if your phone and its battery life can take it.

South Korea only, for now

There is a pretty big caveat here, which is that Samsung has only made Game Booster+ available in South Korea – so the rest of us are left with the standard Game Booster that's been around for a while, until Samsung rolls the update out more widely.

As yet, there's been no official word on if or when we'll all get Game Booster+, but there doesn't seem to be any major reason why it would stay locked to one region. There are plenty of keen mobile gamers outside South Korea, after all.

Tech tipster @tarunvats33 has made the app available for anyone to download, though as usual with sideloading on Android, you do this at your own risk. It's not quite the same as getting the official version direct from Samsung.

Meanwhile, Samsung continues its work on getting One UI 7 (its take on Android 15) ready for other phones besides the Galaxy S25 series. We don't know exactly which handsets are getting it, but we do know it's coming next month.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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