Huawei advertises: Lockscreen becomes a billboard, and we're angry
The lock screen becomes an advertising medium for Huawei. Booking.com shows you holiday destinations and its logo. A quick fix fixes this, but the problem behind the phenomenon remains.
"Booking.com is advertising on my mobile," says video producer Stephanie Tresch over her morning coffee. Her only slightly chipped Huawei P30 Pro shows a holiday idyll and the logo of the online travel provider underneath, along with a few scratches and cracks.
This confirms reports from the USA and other economic areas, which have been complaining since yesterday that Booking.com is advertising on the lock screen of Huawei devices.
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Thank you, Huawei, that makes you really unlikeable.
Good, but the fix is a simple one, because once again we come across my old nemesis Emui. Namely, the "Magazine Unlock" function.
The short fix
You can easily deactivate the adverts, as the option is built into Huawei's Emui user interface, but is opt-out as usual. This means that the function is activated by default, you simply have to deactivate it
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- Go to "Settings"
- Search for "Magazine Unlock"
- Deactivate the function
Your lockscreen background will be a Huawei default image and you can therefore configure it freely. This is because Magazine Unlock uses images from the web, which are constantly updated by Huawei to present you with the most pleasant visual world possible.
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This visual world is curated to an unknown extent and is generally somewhat china-heavy. But at the latest since Booking.com was allowed to present its logo to users of Huawei smartphones, it has become clear that advertising content is no longer taboo. In other words, the curators are pushing images that fulfil a sales purpose. After you've already spent several hundred quid on a smartphone
Why the advertising
?
The fact that manufacturers enter into advertising deals for new devices is nothing new. The only new thing is that the adverts appear on the lock screen of a smartphone. There was a brief slip-up with Windows in 2016 when, according to Reddit user /u/jackflynt, the film "Finding Dory" was advertised on the Windows 10 login screen. The global public, who noticed this, got upset. The advert disappeared again and never appeared again.
Source: /u/jackflynt
The reason why manufacturers have advertising gaffes from time to time is simple: money. Because if Booking.com pays Huawei x million so that the 200 million users of the devices look at the Booking.com logo, then Huawei can theoretically use the money to push down the sales price of the phone. That's why you also have third-party apps on your smartphone that are permanently installed. Booking.com is one such specialist, along with Amazon, eBay and some game suppliers. Huawei has done relatively well with third-party apps so far and hasn't pre-installed too much third-party junk, but the phones are usually cluttered with some Huawei-Emui proprietary features that you'll never need in your life. You can uninstall a lot of them, but you don't have to.
So that's it. It's nice when nothing is sold to you on your device, isn't it?
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.