Samsung’s Exynos team “humiliated” by the decision to sell Snapdragon Galaxy S20s in South Korea

One unique “feature” of Samsung’s Galaxy S-series is that the phones are sold with different system chips depending on the region. Usually, users in the US and China would get the version with Qualcomm’s latest high-end Snapdragon chip, while the rest of the world gets the one with Samsung’s own top Exynos chip. That’s rare because few companies make their own chips and if they do, they just use them for all units of a model.

This year, however, Samsung did things a little differently. The company decided to release the Snapdragon version of the Galaxy S20 series in its home country as well. While that was great news for consumers in South Korea (we’ll explain why in a bit), it caused frustration within Samsung.

Reports coming from the far East country that reached us via SamMobile state that Samsung’s chip division felt “humiliated” by the executives’ decision to ship Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S20 phones in their own country. The team even tried to talk the bosses out of it but were ultimately unsuccessful. According to the report, the Exynos 990 didn’t meet the performance expectations of the higher-ups.

Now that the Galaxy S20 phones have been out for a while, that reasoning seems very logical. Multiple benchmarks and tests have show that the Exynos chip does lack behind the Snapdragon 865 in performance and battery life with a significant margin.

And while we sympathize with the feelings of Samsung’s engineers, there’s another question that arises from that decision: why is it okay for some users to get the subpar chip and not okay for others? Smartphones in Europe often cost more than they do in the States, yet Samsung is basically admitting it’s okay with selling customers there inferior products.

Fans of the brand are understandably upset and have even started a petition asking Samsung to stop selling flagship phones with Exynos chips. The petition will hardly have an effect but if people vote with their wallets and skip buying the Exynos S20 models, then Samsung might reconsider next year.