Huawei found cheating on benchmark tests

Huawei Busted?

While testing out the Honor Play, the guys over at Anandtech made some rather odd observations. Digging a little deeper, they found some a rather surprising discovery. Huawei, and by extension Honor, have been ‘cheating’ to achieve better scores in benchmark tests.

They first made note of this when the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro both got inferior scores to the Mate 10, although both phones had the same SoC, the Kirin 970. Similar results were seen with the newer Honor Play, which got them to look further into the growing suspicions.

Apparently, some Huawei phones can detect when benchmarks are being run. They use this to boost their performance to higher levels just to obtain better scores. Huawei then takes these scores and uses them for their promotional material, giving false impressions to users. It’s quite disappointing to see a company like Huawei resort to these methods.

Following this, Anandtech reached to Huawei regarding the issue at IFA 2018, where they met Dr. Wang Chenglu. Dr. Wang is the President of Software at Huawei’s Consumer Business Group. He claims that Huawei needs these numbers to keep up with the competition who also allegedly boost their numbers.

Dr. Wang also mentions that Huawei feels the numbers don’t represent the user experience of the device. Also according to Dr. Wang, faking benchmarks is supposedly a common practice in China where consumers are easily swayed by numbers, and Huawei needed to adapt to stay competitive. We honestly find this insulting, if not expected.

There is somewhat of a silver lining to all this however. Huawei claims they will ensure that future benchmark data in presentations is independently verified by third parties. We’re certainly hoping that this is the case, as we want Huawei to grow as a company. These types of practices only hurt the market, and we can’t wait for there to be a stop.