Shocker: AnandTech Catches Huawei and Honor Cheating on Benchmarks

Ian Cutress and Andrei Frumusanu, writing for AnandTech:

We did approach Huawei about this during the IFA show last week, and obtained a few comments worth putting here. Another element to the story is that Huawei’s new benchmark behavior very much exceeds anything we’ve seen in the past. We use custom editions of our benchmarks (from their respective developers) so we can test with this “detection” on and off, and the massive differences in performance between the publicly available benchmarks and the internal versions that we’re using for testing is absolutely astonishing.

As usual with investigations like this, we offered Huawei an opportunity to respond. We met with Dr. Wang Chenglu, President of Software at Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, at IFA to discuss this issue, which is purely a software play from Huawei. […]

He states that it is much better than it used to be, and that Huawei “wants to come together with others in China to find the best verification benchmark for user experience”. He also states that “in the Android ecosystem, other manufacturers also mislead with their numbers”, citing one specific popular smartphone manufacturer in China as the biggest culprit, and that it is becoming “common practice in China”. Huawei wants to open up to consumers, but have trouble when competitors continually post unrealistic scores.

In other words, he’s defending Huawei’s cheating because China is full of cheats. You have to love that “in the Android ecosystem” hedge too.

★ Friday, 7 September 2018