A Chinese developer has decided to rename his application using the name of the AnTuTu Benchmark tool installation file. The goal ? Trick Android smartphones into giving optimum performance.
Zhang Wei is a clever and imaginative developer. He has just created a somewhat special fork of Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, which he published on Github. Its main feature is that it should offer better performance than the native emulator on Android smartphones. And to achieve this, the Chinese developer used a rather clever technique.
He simply renamed his emulator installation package. Although his fork of Citra has classic name (Citra for Android), he decided to rename the installation package of his application “com.antutu.ABenchMark”, the name given to the installation package of the benchmarking application AnTuTu.
A fork of Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, is offering builds with AnTuTu’s package name so devices that boost performance (read: cheat) in the benchmark will be tricked into boosting performance in the emulator.
Improvised. Adapt. Overcome.https://t.co/yTCddnKd7I pic.twitter.com/8XNCWS70Hc
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) July 4, 2022
Why choose such a name? Simply to fool Android smartphones from certain manufacturers who have become accustomed to improving the performance of theirs when they detect that the performance test application is in use. In this case Citra for Android being identified as AnTuTu, devices known to cheat on their performance will momentarily boost theirs while using the emulator.
Several cheats already pinned
Several smartphone manufacturers and chipmakers have indeed been caught cheating in the past few years. The most recent example is that of Samsung. The Korean manufacturer’s terminals equipped with Game Optimizing Service, an optimization application for games, limited the performance of applications installed on the devices with the exception of performance test applications.
But before Samsung, other manufacturers have also been caught in the act. In 2017, OnePlus modified the operating system of its OnePlus 5 so that throttling was disabled (and therefore offered better performance) when a benchmarking application was running. Already at that time, the technique used was to detect the identifier of the application to tell the device to run its processor at full speed. A little later, in 2018, the Chinese manufacturer Huawei was caught boosting the performance of the chip of several of its smartphones to obtain better results in the 3DMark performance test tool. But the prize for cheating undoubtedly goes to Mediatek. The Taiwanese founder, a major supplier of SoCs for mobiles, was pinned in 2020 for having set up a cheat on a very large scale, and had faked the results of famous benchmark applications such as AnTuTu, Geekbench, or even PCMark.
Source :
Mishaal Rahman