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Huawei users say phone lock screens have started showing ads

By Brittany Roston/

Some Huawei smartphone owners have reported the appearance of advertisement on their handset's lock screen. The unexpected ads, which seem to appear only on preinstalled wallpapers of landscape imagery, have been spotted on a number of models, including the P20 Pro and P30 Pro. All of the advertisements are for the same travel booking website.

Huawei phone owners have started sharing screenshots of the advertisements on their phone lock screens; each one involves a preinstalled landscape wallpaper and ads for the website Booking.com. Reports starting appearing on June 12 and have increased today. Impacted users are reporting in from countries all over the world, including in Europe and South Africa.

As expected, users aren't happy. The sudden appearance across so many devices and regions has users speculating whether Huawei has decided to mass deploy ads on its mobile devices, but there's no confirmation of that at this time. Users can get rid of the ads by changing to a different wallpaper.

Users claim they never saw any sort of announcement or warning that the advertisements were inbound, and that they were never prompted to opt into getting advertisements. Though lock screens ads aren't unheard of, they usually only appear from either malware or third-party apps the user must deliberately install and enable.

In a statement to Digital Trends, Huawei said that it hadn't initiated the advertisements and that users should follow 'publicly available directions on how to remove lock screen ads.' The company is suggesting the ads are caused by a third-party app or service, but users point out that they appeared at the same time, featuring the same ads, on the same preinstalled wallpapers.

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