Huawei may be turning to new methods of making income — advertising on its smartphones.
Angry users have begun to complain that Huawei is displaying advertisements on the lock screen of its smartphones, seemingly without warning or without making any sort of announcement.
You can’t seem to switch off the “feature” without making some trade-offs. We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
A number of users on Reddit reported finding advertisements on their lock screen. One user, who goes by the username Quacksnooze, posted a screenshot of a Booking.com ad that suddenly appeared on their phone.
Other users reported getting ads as well. According to the Reddit thread, four images related to Booking.com were added to the Huawei phone’s wallpaper rotation, meaning that they would start showing up as wallpapers like any other image. The images could be manually deleted, but it’s possible more would be added in the future. You can also get around the issue by not using Huawei’s Magazine lock screen wallpaper, but that’s a bit of a frustrating solution.
Users have reason to be upset. At the best of times advertisements online can be intrusive, and having ads as obviously placed as on the phone’s lock screen can remove some of the customization and personalization that users get with their phones. It’s not just cheaper phones that are getting ads either — even high-end devices, like the Honor P20, seem to be getting ads.
Huawei has come under fire in the U.S. recently: the Trump administration recently blacklisted the company, banning U.S. firms from selling parts or software to it (or buying from it) without prior permission from the government. The move is sure to impact Huawei’s bottom line.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen advertising like this on a smartphone, however usually there’s some sort of trade-off. For example, Amazon serves ads on its Prime exclusive phones, but you at least get a discount on the phone itself. Some cheaper devices sometimes have ads in an effort to subsidize the cost of the phone for the manufacturer. There’s really no excuse, however, to place ads on high-end, expensive phones that customers are paying for — and we wouldn’t be surprised to see customers turn away from Huawei for implementing things like this.
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