The Galaxy S22, Galaxy S22+, and Galaxy S22 Ultra are still holding up nicely in 2024. Granted, they are aging and are being surpassed by new Galaxy S models every year, but they also received Galaxy AI features and continue to get featureful updates.
However, while the Galaxy S22 experience remains fairly solid, you may have experienced a growing problem with your 2022 flagship phone. Sometimes, it heats up too much, especially when playing mobile games. It didn't used to be like this. What happened, and is there a way to fix this?
Well, if all this sounds familiar, there could be numerous factors making your phone heat up more than usual. And there might not be a clear-cut answer to your Galaxy S22 issue.
However, you might be able to solve the problem by going back in time, figuratively speaking, and tracing your steps back to try and remember whether you used 5G when you first got your Galaxy S22 device and whether you switched to 5G in the meantime. Here's why.
Try going back to LTE when playing games
If you're in a market where your Galaxy S22, S22+, or S22 Ultra shipped with the Exynos 2200 SoC, there's a chance you didn't have as much access to 5G when you first bought your phone in 2022 as you do now.
You may have used a 4G SIM when you acquired the Galaxy S22, or the 5G network coverage wasn't good enough, so your Galaxy S22 would fall back on 4G way more often than it does today. Maybe your network operator didn't even offer 5G coverage on your plan two years ago, but now it does.
In other words, there are several factors that may have prevented you from using 5G (or using 5G more often) two years ago, and there is a chance that, in the meantime, those obstacles became fewer, leading to you now using 5G fairly often.
If that's the case, that might also be why your Galaxy S22, S22+, or S22 Ultra heats up more (and more often) lately, especially when playing online mobile games. Using 5G tends to generate more heat inside your phone. And whenever that switch from 4G to 5G happened, maybe that's when your phone started misbehaving.
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With that in mind, you may want to try limiting your Galaxy S22 to 4G to at least recreate the usage conditions from a couple of years ago and confirm whether 5G is the problem.
Granted, doing so wouldn't change the fact that the phone might heat up more every time you are using 5G, but at least you'd figure out whether something's changed about your phone since 2022 till now or if it's an external factor (in this case, the network) that triggered the change.
If you want to try limiting your Galaxy S22, S22+, or S22 Ultra to 4G, open the Settings app, access “Connections,” tap “Mobile networks,” then select a non-5G option from the “Network mode” menu.
