Huawei, which is gaining a reputation for shady marketing practices, has been caught cheating again, this time on the benchmark tests for the flagship P20 smartphone.
The Chinese smartphone manufacturer is capable of creating amazing smartphones, with the Huawei P20 Pro being named the best smartphone of 2018 by the European Image and Sound Association. However, it needs to clean up its act if it wants to maintain trust from consumers.
Huawei Caught Cheating P20 Pro Benchmark Scores
Huawei was caught to be optimizing certain smartphones so that they would score better in benchmark tests.
AnandTech discovered that the Huawei P20 was programmed to maximize performance when running popular benchmarking app 3DMark. UL Benchmarks, the company behind 3DMark, followed up the report by not only delisting the Huawei P20 from its performance rankings but also the Huawei P20 Pro, the Huawei Nova 3, and the Honor Play.
UL Benchmarks determined that Huawei was manipulating the benchmark tests for the mentioned smartphones by comparing the scores that the devices earned on the public version of 3DMark, available on the Google Play Store, and on a private version held only by the company.
The scores from the public version of 3DMark were up to 47 percent higher compared to the private version. The smartphones were found to be using a hidden Performance Mode that overrides the usual power profile of the devices to spit out higher benchmark scores.
In a statement to Android Authority, Huawei admitted that its smartphones use Performance Mode when they recognize that a benchmarking application is running and that the mode is being planned to be made public. This practice should be considered wrong, though, as it evokes the same kind of cheating as the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
Huawei Needs To Get It Together
Huawei took second place in global smartphone sales in the second quarter, beating Apple and closing in on industry leader Samsung.
However, it becomes hard to celebrate its achievements when Huawei keeps finding itself in the middle of controversies.
Last month, Huawei was found guilty of false advertising, as it was trying to pass off DSLR camera pictures as selfies that were taken by the Huawei Nova 3. This follows a similar case two years ago, when a Huawei P9 photo uploaded to the company's Google+ page was determined to have been taken by a Canon EOS 5D Mark III.
For Huawei to keep the trust of loyal customers and attract new ones, it will simply have to stop cheating and start doing things right.
