Galaxy M22 long-term owners: are we all pretending the slowdown and “90 Hz” story aren’t a design problem?
After a couple of years with multiple units in the family, I’m seeing patterns that don’t look like normal aging. They look like systemic choices that midrange users are just expected to accept.
What I’m seeing
- UI fluidity degrades noticeably after a few months, even on light users who mostly use WhatsApp, YouTube, and a browser. Clean reset temporarily helps, but the “stickiness” returns fast.
- App installs/updates and camera-to-gallery workflows feel disproportionately slow compared to similarly aged Snapdragon/UFS-based phones.
- The 90 Hz panel behaves like a 60 Hz phone in many common apps, even with Motion Smoothness set to High. Developer option “Show refresh rate” frequently reports 60.
- RAM Plus seems to “help” only on paper; enabling it on an eMMC device feels like it adds write amplification and jank during multitasking.
- Battery charging often plateaus or heats more when the screen is on and VoLTE is active; overnight charging learns to park earlier than 100% and sometimes won’t top off without a cable replug.
My working hypothesis
- Storage is the real bottleneck here. The combo of MediaTek G80 + eMMC 5.x + One UI services + ever-growing app sizes creates constant I/O contention. Media scanning, thumbnail generation, dexopt after app updates, and swapfile writes (RAM Plus) pile onto a slow storage bus.
- The 90 Hz story on M22 looks like policy capping rather than capability. Apps that aren’t whitelisted or that trip thermal/power limits seem to drop to 60 Hz regardless of the global setting.
- Device Care’s background maintenance and aggressive memory reclaim may be exacerbating stutter on eMMC by causing more frequent small writes and GC pressure.
- Security patches have trailed off to biannual faster than marketing implies, and vendor-level patch dates don’t always match the Android SPL shown to the user.
Requests for data from other M22 owners
- If you can, enable Developer options > Show refresh rate. Do you see 60 Hz in Instagram, Maps, Chrome scrolling, and your launcher after a few hours of uptime? Does a reboot temporarily restore 90 Hz?
- Try AndroBench or CPDT: sequential write/read and random write before and after:
1) Clearing Gallery/Media Storage thumbnails,
2) Disabling RAM Plus and rebooting,
3) Leaving WhatsApp to auto-download media for a week.
Post the numbers and any change in app install time or camera-to-gallery delay.
- With RAM Plus on vs off, does the phone stutter more when installing updates from Play Store while browsing?
- During a long WhatsApp call on speaker, plug in a 25W charger. Does charging stall around 80-90% until the call ends? Do temps spike and then the phone reduces charge current?
- Check Developer options > Running services for One UI/Device Care/Customization Service memory usage. Any runaway processes after a few days’ uptime?
Concrete asks to Samsung (and why this matters)
- Stop shipping RAM Plus enabled by default on eMMC devices, or at least add a “Storage-friendly mode” that disables swap and reduces background write churn.
- Publish the refresh rate policy for M22: which conditions/apps are capped to 60 Hz, and give us a true “force 90 Hz” override with a battery disclaimer.
- Expose storage maintenance controls: user-schedulable fstrim/GC windows and throttled media scanning to avoid peak-time I/O contention.
- Offer a “Lean One UI” toggle for legacy devices that removes heavy services (app preloads, analytics, SmartThings hooks) and favors responsiveness over features.
- Be transparent about vendor security patch levels vs Android SPL on M-series, especially as devices age into the e-waste danger zone.
If other owners can replicate even half of this with numbers, we should stop pretending “it’s just aging” and acknowledge that midrange hardware plus opaque software policies are the culprit. Who’s got logs, benchmarks, or better counter-evidence?