Huawei is not having a great year. After being blacklisted by Google, Sandisk and basically all other major tech companies in the US, they are struggling to keep a good PR image. If you thought things could not get any worse, Huawei lock screen ads were appearing on devices around the globe and had people scratching their heads as to how it all happened.
At first, Huawei denied the incident until more reports came to the surface where users had “Booking.com” ads appearing on their lock screens. These ads were showing on clean devices with no shoddy Android apps implementing them.
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Huawei and Honor’s official statements say the ads were published from Huawei’s servers by accident and were deleted. The question everyone is asking, is how this feature was even a thing in the first place? Why would Huawei have an advertising system that allows ads to be placed on user’s lock screens without consent or any third-party widget being installed?
Wtf. https://t.co/Fv4RzUmM1D ads on my lock screen. Anyone else with a Huawei getting this? pic.twitter.com/ILI6vs6wVD
— Ed Spencer (@efjspencer) June 13, 2019
The Huawei lock screen ads showed on the default lock screen when the Magazine feature was enabled. The ads appeared in the image sliders that cycle through the Magazine page and somehow made it into other places.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”Honor” link=”” color=”#E32200″ class=”” size=”19″]”We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to your experience. Please kindly be informed that we have taken down those lock-screen images from our servers, as they should not be appearing on lock-screen interfaces. We will continue to improve our services and bring you an excellent user experience.”[/perfectpullquote]
Could it be a sign of things to come? Who knows but with Huawei working on their own OS to rival Android (now that they are not allowed to use the platform), they could be testing such ad services that users will just have to deal with.
