Joe Hindy / Android Authority
TL;DR Ever spotted an emulator for Android with an unusual reference in its package name? There’s a good reason why.
Phones that “cheat” at benchmarks by unthrottling performance for specific apps can often be tricked by a simple name-change.
This approach isn’t without its trade-offs, and not all phones will respond the same.
Video game emulation has been pushing boundaries for decades, and it’s just as exciting to see a PlayStation 4 being emulated in 2025 as it was to first witness GameBoy games running on a 486. Because emulators have to do just so much computation to effectively simulate one computer inside another, we regularly see emulation targets lagging a generation or two behind the systems we’re running these apps on. But for Android-based emulators in particular, it turns out there’s a little trick that some use to squeeze more performance out of your device than might be available to the average app.
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Now, full disclosure: This trick is nothing new, and it’s something Android developers have known about (and have been taking advantage of) for years now. But it’s also just the sort of hacky, esoteric loophole that you might have reasonably assumed was shut down long ago — as it turns out, though, this one’s still got some legs on it.
Over on Reddit’s EmulationOnAndroid sub, Producdevity, developer of EmuReady, shares a reminder of this clever solution. Remember how many times over the years you’ve heard stories about Android manufacturers “cheating” at benchmark performance? Our phones rarely run with all their hardware cranked to 100% because we want our batteries to last a reasonable amount of time, and in normal operation, are constantly making decisions about striking that right balance between performance and endurance.
Instead of accurately benchmarking real-world operation, though, some companies configured their phones to recognize specific benchmarking apps (usually by way of their package names), and to say “the hell with battery optimizations” when it detects them running, squeezing every last bit of performance out of the hardware. But that kind of hacky approach turns out to be ripe for abuse, and developers have realized that they can also flip that same invisible performance switch by just using similar package names for their own apps.
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