Several Huawei users took to social media to express their frustration towards Huawei for displaying ads on their smartphone devices. Many people complained on Twitter about seeing adverts of travel companies “Booking.com” on their home screen.
While other smartphones come with home screen photos of beautiful landscapes as default paper, Huawei users, however, are seeing images of different landscapes with a company logo on it. The image of an advert by “Booking.com” seems to have been added to the phone’s Magazine Unlock feature – a Huawei tool which displays a rotating set of images each time the device’s screen is activated and unlocked.
Considering the current situation of Huawei, this is the worst possible thing that the company can do to its customers, and understandably the company has earned a lot of PR on social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
#Huawei has turned the random landscape backgrounds on the lock screen into ads. Wtf fuck this pic.twitter.com/6dAUeu17Jf
— Alex (@ValexWhoa) June 13, 2019
Another user suggested that turning off the ‘Unlock magazine’ feature will stop the ads from “Booking.com” to show up.
“Just turn off Unlock Magazine, which will no longer appear to you. Or simply delete the photos that are written to your gallery advertisements and you’re done.”
Just turn off Unlock Magazine, which will no longer appear to you. Or simply delete the photos that are written to your gallery advertisements and you’re done. pic.twitter.com/zdzvdkniDH
— Reis (@MrBIGdisaster) June 14, 2019
However, according to the explanation provided by Huawei, the ads that are plaguing user experience are caused by third-party apps or services and not from Huawei itself.
“The ads are not initiated by Huawei. We encourage individuals to check app settings, or follow publicly available directions on how to remove lock screen ads,” Huawei said in a statement to Digital Trends.
For better comparison, Huawei cited a similar issue which affected Samsung’s user experience about a year ago. An Honor representative in a Tweet also confirmed that Honor isn’t serving any ads on its phones.
This is strange. Certainly none of the current HONOR devices are doing this in any markets.
— Bhavya (Haya) (@bhavis) June 13, 2019
Huawei in recent times has come under a lot of criticism by the USA while the majority of smartphone parts provider companies have severed their contacts with the Chinese company. At a time like this, the last thing that Huawei would want is bad PR with their consumers.
