Archive: June 14, 2019. Some Huawei and Honor phone owners reported seeing Booking.com branding within images shown on their lock screens. The reports concerned the rotating wallpaper experience associated with Magazine Unlock, rather than every Huawei phone or every lock-screen setting.
This article preserves the 2019 event and adds the company’s response. It should not be read as a claim that the same campaign is running on current phones.
What users reported
Owners shared images and complaints during June 2019 showing travel-site branding within landscape wallpapers. The distinction matters: this was not evidence that all apps or every part of the phone had begun displaying those advertisements.
Contemporaneous coverage and Huawei’s statement documented the reports and the subsequent response. Reports from individual handsets do not establish the total number of affected devices.
Huawei’s response
In a statement supplied to Android Central and reproduced by contemporary outlets, Huawei apologized for the inconvenience and said it had taken the affected lock-screen images off its servers because they should not have appeared there.
The company also explained that an image already downloaded onto a handset could still need to be removed locally. Removing a server-side image and deleting a downloaded copy are different steps; the original article did not make that distinction clearly.
The available statement does not establish why those images were introduced or quantify the campaign’s reach. This article does not infer a commercial motive or claim that every user saw an advertisement.
What Magazine Unlock does
Huawei’s official Magazine Unlock support guide describes a feature that changes the lock-screen image when the screen is turned on and can download new images. It also documents controls to disable the rotation or manage individual pictures.
That support page covers multiple software versions. Someone checking a device today should use instructions for the actual model and software, rather than assume a menu sequence reported in 2019 will still be identical.
What this archived story establishes
- Some users reported Booking.com-branded lock-screen pictures in June 2019.
- Huawei subsequently said it had removed the affected pictures from its servers.
- Already-downloaded images could require a local removal step.
- The incident does not, by itself, show the present advertising behavior of every Huawei or Honor device.
Image note: Archival lock-screen image illustrating the Booking.com-branded wallpaper reports in June 2019.
