Did Samsung throttle Galaxy S23 charging speed with One UI 6.1?

Yesterday, Samsung started rolling out One UI 6.1 to many high-end smartphones and tablets, including the Galaxy S23 series devices. While the new software customization brings a ton of exciting and useful features, including Galaxy AI, many people have been complaining on the internet that their Galaxy S23 is charging at a slower speed and lower wattage after upgrading to One UI 6.1. Well, we decided to check out if that’s the case, and what we found will not keep you from installing the update.

The Galaxy S23 supports charging at up to 25 watts. However, on Samsung’s Community forum for UAE, a user that goes by ‘Pruone' made a post claiming that One UI 6.1 has restricted the charging speed of their Galaxy S23 to 15 watts. They shared a screenshot of Electron, an app that gives you battery and charging statistics, which shows that the device is charging at 15 watts. Quoting that post, an account on X/Twitter with the handle @theonecid asked people if they were facing the same issue, and many people agreed that they noticed their Galaxy S23 charging at a slower speed.

To check if that’s the case, we took our Galaxy S23, which is running on One UI 6.1, plugged it into a 120W PPS charger, and measured the charging speed using the Pluggable Voltage And Amperage Meter. According to it, our Galaxy S23 was getting charged at around 20W as you can see in the image below. That’s 5W lower than what Samsung claims but the phone charges at 25W occasionally, especially when the battery is very low. Typically, it gets charged at 20 watts, even on One UI 6.0. So, no, Samsung hasn't limited the charging speed of the Galaxy S23 to 15W with the One UI 6.1 update.

It is also worth mentioning that as the battery percentage keeps increasing, the charging wattage keeps going down. So, it is possible that the phones of those users might be charging at 15W because the battery percentage is at a higher level. It is also possible that Electron could be showing wrong readings but the chances of that happening are very low. We will soon check the charging wattage with Electron and also perform the test on our Galaxy S23 Ultra and update the article with our findings.