If you are using a Huawei smartphone as your daily driver, you might have noticed that the company has pushed a Toyota ad on some of its devices today.
A number of Huawei users, in Kenya and different parts of the world, have taken it to Twitter to document the occurrence. Citing that clicking the link on the ad redirects to a Chinese website. According to the user, the site contains “1 million ads”. As seen on the screenshots, the link is clearly placed there to endorse a Toyota van.
I think Huawei has started pushing ads to their devices. I just got one on my lock screen but it was in Chinese. The language used on the link that is on that ad is also in Chinese with 1 million ads?
— ??? (@I_AmTelvin) May 1, 2020
It would be reasonable to consider that the ads are in a foreign language probably because of the company’s home market. Secondly, only a handful of users have so far reported spotting the ad on their devices so it would be possible that Huawei is just testing out this out. There’s also the possibility that this was an error and the ad was probably meant only for the company’s home market.
Of course, other brands like TECNO and Infinix officially started pushing ads on their devices, a decision that was quite controversial. So if this is made official on Huawei, it would definitely be interesting to see what users around the world respond to it.
You should, however, note that Huawei has not released an official statement in regards to this occurrence. We have reached out to the company and we shall update the article once we get a response.
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