If you have a Huawei P30 Pro (or other recent Huawei smartphones) running the latest software updates, you might have noticed something a little disturbing happening on your device that you’ve probably paid a good amount of money for.
Like many people I guess, I usually have a photo of my kids or the whole family on my lock screen. I like a nice little reminder when I’m at work. Anyway, this morning I noticed something a little different on the P30 Pro I’ve been using.
Gone was my own choice of lockscreen wallpaper, and it seemed Huawei’s Magazine Unlock had been somehow re-enabled. Fair enough, I’ll put that down to “that just happens, I guess”.
However, while I might overlook something like that, what I saw on the lockscreen wasn’t just the typical “Magazine Unlock” wallpapers that one usually sees – photos of places around the world which capture the eye and the imagination. Seriously, some of the photos are quite nice, and I don’t mind them.
Today, though, I was greeted with an advertisement for booking.com. For those not across it, booking.com is one of the pre-installed apps that comes on most Huawei devices (and one that I remove straight away). Not only did I get a nice big advertisement on the lock screen, but also a prompt to check booking.com’s “Getaway Deals” – take a look in the bottom left of the screenshot:
I’m sure I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t much like advertising like this on my lockscreen. Granted, I didn’t pay for this phone – it’s the review device supplied by Huawei – but if I had paid for it, I’d be spewing that it was considered appropriate to show advertising on my lockscreen without my permission.
Over the course of the morning, I saw a few other beautiful backgrounds with booking.com logos across the middle, and better yet, clicking on the Getaway Deals text started to bring up some information too:
Clicking the link took me to a “Getaway 2019” landing page on Booking.com:
Being that it seems this is part of Magazine Unlock, this advertisement isn’t shown on every unlock; the image changes each time you lock/unlock your phone. However, I saw it more than a few times this morning before I actually figured out what was going on.
We understand from reports on social media that it isn’t just the Huawei P30 Pro affected; affected models include the P30 Pro, P20, P20 Lite, Honor 10, and P20 Pro.
Ausdroid approached Huawei for comment before publishing this story. Huawei advised it had “no comment to give us in relation to this issue at this time”.
