Hello all.
Some context: I recently purchased the Huawei Mate 20 Pro because I had that ‘itch’ for a new gadget/phone that I’m sure many of you are familiar with. That, coupled with its beautiful design, its amazing camera setup and the positive reviews made me go out and buy it without hesitation.
That was 4 days ago. I have now decided to return it tomorrow.
It has simply been the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had, with any phone.
I decided to post this here for three reasons:
1. To inform others of my experience with this phone before they go out and buy it themselves
2. To inspire Huawei to do better
3. To simply just vent
So, why am I returning this phone and what has been so frustrating about it?
Here are the bullet points:
• Huawei’s modifications to Android are terrible. Probably the worst OEM ‘skin’ out there.*
• EMUI is a buggy mess with extremely poor memory management. Especially when using a homescreen replacement app like Nova Launcher.
• The cameras produce great results. Sometimes. But it often struggles with getting the exposure right, the video output is choppy with disappointing stabilisation (which can’t be turned off!) and crashes all the time.
• NFC just doesn’t want to play nice with my Banking app making it so that I’ve been unable to perform contactless payments like I’ve been doing effortlessly with my previous two phones.
• Huawei’s implementation of notifications and the status bar icons introduce a ton of usability issues to the point where the phone simply fails to effectively inform the user about incoming alerts and messages.
If you’ve made it this far, I’m sure that by now you either recognise some (or all) of the things I’ve described or have simply become curious about what I mean by this.
Let’s go through them one by one.
Huawei’s version of Android
As I’ve said above, EMUI is probably the worst OEM ‘skin’ out there. It looks ‘fine’, I guess. But if you’ve used pretty much any other recent version of Android before (either stock or modified) then you’ll feel ‘handicapped’ using the Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
No access to notifications or quick toggles from the lock screen. No way to set a live wallpaper as the lock screen background. The default ‘Home screen’ is 'ok'. Just ok, but not great. I get that Huawei aims to simplify things for its less tech-savvy customers… but when you have the option to either have the ‘iOS’ solution of having all apps on the home screen or use the traditional Android solution of having an app drawer, then don’t use an old fashioned, outdated ‘drawer’ button to bring up all the apps. Just take Google’s lead here. Makes you wonder what Huawei’s UX / research team has been up to these last 2 years.
Plus, why on earth is there no option to open the notifications panel using a ‘slide down’ gesture from the Home Screen?*
Instead, you have the option to add a ‘button’ to the navigation menu across the bottom which allows you to quickly open the notifications panel. But then they decide to re-arrange ALL the other icons (Recent Apps, Home, Back) so that they are aligned in the center of the screen and I keep pressing the wrong button when I rely on muscle memory when trying to hit the Home button. Incredibly frustrating and just very, very poor UX design.
EMUI: A buggy mess that doesn’t play nice with homescreen replacement apps like Nova Launcher
So what? Most of the above can be fixed by installing Nova Launcher, right? Like on any other Android phone. Well, guess what? Nope.
Because on the Mate 20 Pro, things just break all over the place when using alternative home screen (Launcher) apps.*
• The memory management is so poor that it effectively becomes impossible to be productive. Apps refresh to their original state when switching between them to simply copy and paste some text over from one to the other. Spotify is killed in the background while using Chrome with as many as 3 tabs open.
• Navigation Gestures stop working properly, causing the ‘swipe up to go Home’ gesture to briefly bring up the ‘Recent Apps’ switcher first
• The ‘Recent Apps’ switcher can only be navigated by pressing on an app preview that is perfectly centred. Tapping any of the apps on the sides simply just closes the Recent Apps switcher, taking you back to the Home screen and ignoring your input. It’s infuriating, since it works perfectly fine when using Huawei’s own Home Screen.
• Huawei’s ’Themes’ app (and probably other apps) doesn’t respect Android’s native Back button behaviour, resulting in weird, inconsistent and frustrating navigating behaviour.
The Cameras: Sometimes great for photography, terrible for video
I’ve already said pretty much everything I wanted to say about the cameras. The cameras produce great results. Sometimes. And I love the wide angle lens. Unfortunately, the camera/software often struggle with getting the exposure right and the video output is choppy with disappointing stabilisation. This can’t be turned off, by the way… so if I wanted to mount my phone to a gimbal, there’s really no point since the actual image is already cropped.
Also… no 4K 60fps is a big disappointment, but I should have read up about this before buying the phone I guess. Still, is it odd that I assume a late 2018 ‘flagship’ phone would have it by now? I don’t think so.
Furthermore, the camera app crashes all the time, or gets ‘stuck’ rendering the final image (the Gallery would display this image slightly darkened with a white ‘Loading…’ text on top of the photo). How can this be a thing, Huawei? This is not Beta software… but it certainly feels like it!
NFC doesn’t work properly
From the 4 days that I have had this phone, I must have spent at least 2 trying to get it set up with my Banking app (ING). An app that I have used with my last 2 smartphones to pay contactless without any issues. I have reinstalled the app, reset the phone, called my bank, called Huawei customer service to see if it was perhaps a known issue with this phone model… all to no avail. Unacceptable to me.
Notifications / Status bar icons usability issues
Repeating what I wrote above; Huawei’s implementation of notifications and the status bar icons introduce a ton of usability issues to the point where the phone simply fails to effectively inform the user about incoming alerts and messages.
• Since there is limited space due to the notch, you would have thought that Huawei allows people to hide any icon they don’t need (NFC, Bluetooth, etc) so that the more important icons can be seen.
• The lock screen allows up to 3 notifications to be seen concurrently. It’s impossible to interact with any notification that lives in the ‘more (+)’ group. You have to unlock the phone, reach out all the way to the top (since you can’t assign a ‘swipe down to show notifications gesture) and then drag down the notifications panel.*
I constantly felt uninformed and kind of nervous about missing out on important notifications using this phone. And this is on Android, the OS that does notifications RIGHT… usually. Not when it’s a Huawei phone, apparently.
In conclusion, I really wanted to like this phone… but I simply can’t justify keeping it. In the past I would have looked for other ways to 'fix' these issues, look into custom ROMs or check the headlines for info on future updates... but I simply don't have the time and patience for that anymore. When I spend this kind of money on a premium phone this day and age, I expect it to work. And to work well.
This phone simply doesn't.
Reading through this forum and catching up on Huawei’s track record where it concerns updates and bug fixes didn’t inspire much confidence either.
I sincerely hope for those of you that decide to stick with the phone that Huawei get their act together in the near future. In fact, I hope to one day buy another Huawei phone and find myself pleasantly surprised… but right now, I would not recommend this phone to anyone.
Some context: I recently purchased the Huawei Mate 20 Pro because I had that ‘itch’ for a new gadget/phone that I’m sure many of you are familiar with. That, coupled with its beautiful design, its amazing camera setup and the positive reviews made me go out and buy it without hesitation.
That was 4 days ago. I have now decided to return it tomorrow.
It has simply been the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had, with any phone.
I decided to post this here for three reasons:
1. To inform others of my experience with this phone before they go out and buy it themselves
2. To inspire Huawei to do better
3. To simply just vent
So, why am I returning this phone and what has been so frustrating about it?
Here are the bullet points:
• Huawei’s modifications to Android are terrible. Probably the worst OEM ‘skin’ out there.*
• EMUI is a buggy mess with extremely poor memory management. Especially when using a homescreen replacement app like Nova Launcher.
• The cameras produce great results. Sometimes. But it often struggles with getting the exposure right, the video output is choppy with disappointing stabilisation (which can’t be turned off!) and crashes all the time.
• NFC just doesn’t want to play nice with my Banking app making it so that I’ve been unable to perform contactless payments like I’ve been doing effortlessly with my previous two phones.
• Huawei’s implementation of notifications and the status bar icons introduce a ton of usability issues to the point where the phone simply fails to effectively inform the user about incoming alerts and messages.
If you’ve made it this far, I’m sure that by now you either recognise some (or all) of the things I’ve described or have simply become curious about what I mean by this.
Let’s go through them one by one.
Huawei’s version of Android
As I’ve said above, EMUI is probably the worst OEM ‘skin’ out there. It looks ‘fine’, I guess. But if you’ve used pretty much any other recent version of Android before (either stock or modified) then you’ll feel ‘handicapped’ using the Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
No access to notifications or quick toggles from the lock screen. No way to set a live wallpaper as the lock screen background. The default ‘Home screen’ is 'ok'. Just ok, but not great. I get that Huawei aims to simplify things for its less tech-savvy customers… but when you have the option to either have the ‘iOS’ solution of having all apps on the home screen or use the traditional Android solution of having an app drawer, then don’t use an old fashioned, outdated ‘drawer’ button to bring up all the apps. Just take Google’s lead here. Makes you wonder what Huawei’s UX / research team has been up to these last 2 years.
Plus, why on earth is there no option to open the notifications panel using a ‘slide down’ gesture from the Home Screen?*
Instead, you have the option to add a ‘button’ to the navigation menu across the bottom which allows you to quickly open the notifications panel. But then they decide to re-arrange ALL the other icons (Recent Apps, Home, Back) so that they are aligned in the center of the screen and I keep pressing the wrong button when I rely on muscle memory when trying to hit the Home button. Incredibly frustrating and just very, very poor UX design.
EMUI: A buggy mess that doesn’t play nice with homescreen replacement apps like Nova Launcher
So what? Most of the above can be fixed by installing Nova Launcher, right? Like on any other Android phone. Well, guess what? Nope.
Because on the Mate 20 Pro, things just break all over the place when using alternative home screen (Launcher) apps.*
• The memory management is so poor that it effectively becomes impossible to be productive. Apps refresh to their original state when switching between them to simply copy and paste some text over from one to the other. Spotify is killed in the background while using Chrome with as many as 3 tabs open.
• Navigation Gestures stop working properly, causing the ‘swipe up to go Home’ gesture to briefly bring up the ‘Recent Apps’ switcher first
• The ‘Recent Apps’ switcher can only be navigated by pressing on an app preview that is perfectly centred. Tapping any of the apps on the sides simply just closes the Recent Apps switcher, taking you back to the Home screen and ignoring your input. It’s infuriating, since it works perfectly fine when using Huawei’s own Home Screen.
• Huawei’s ’Themes’ app (and probably other apps) doesn’t respect Android’s native Back button behaviour, resulting in weird, inconsistent and frustrating navigating behaviour.
The Cameras: Sometimes great for photography, terrible for video
I’ve already said pretty much everything I wanted to say about the cameras. The cameras produce great results. Sometimes. And I love the wide angle lens. Unfortunately, the camera/software often struggle with getting the exposure right and the video output is choppy with disappointing stabilisation. This can’t be turned off, by the way… so if I wanted to mount my phone to a gimbal, there’s really no point since the actual image is already cropped.
Also… no 4K 60fps is a big disappointment, but I should have read up about this before buying the phone I guess. Still, is it odd that I assume a late 2018 ‘flagship’ phone would have it by now? I don’t think so.
Furthermore, the camera app crashes all the time, or gets ‘stuck’ rendering the final image (the Gallery would display this image slightly darkened with a white ‘Loading…’ text on top of the photo). How can this be a thing, Huawei? This is not Beta software… but it certainly feels like it!
NFC doesn’t work properly
From the 4 days that I have had this phone, I must have spent at least 2 trying to get it set up with my Banking app (ING). An app that I have used with my last 2 smartphones to pay contactless without any issues. I have reinstalled the app, reset the phone, called my bank, called Huawei customer service to see if it was perhaps a known issue with this phone model… all to no avail. Unacceptable to me.
Notifications / Status bar icons usability issues
Repeating what I wrote above; Huawei’s implementation of notifications and the status bar icons introduce a ton of usability issues to the point where the phone simply fails to effectively inform the user about incoming alerts and messages.
• Since there is limited space due to the notch, you would have thought that Huawei allows people to hide any icon they don’t need (NFC, Bluetooth, etc) so that the more important icons can be seen.
• The lock screen allows up to 3 notifications to be seen concurrently. It’s impossible to interact with any notification that lives in the ‘more (+)’ group. You have to unlock the phone, reach out all the way to the top (since you can’t assign a ‘swipe down to show notifications gesture) and then drag down the notifications panel.*
I constantly felt uninformed and kind of nervous about missing out on important notifications using this phone. And this is on Android, the OS that does notifications RIGHT… usually. Not when it’s a Huawei phone, apparently.
In conclusion, I really wanted to like this phone… but I simply can’t justify keeping it. In the past I would have looked for other ways to 'fix' these issues, look into custom ROMs or check the headlines for info on future updates... but I simply don't have the time and patience for that anymore. When I spend this kind of money on a premium phone this day and age, I expect it to work. And to work well.
This phone simply doesn't.
Reading through this forum and catching up on Huawei’s track record where it concerns updates and bug fixes didn’t inspire much confidence either.
I sincerely hope for those of you that decide to stick with the phone that Huawei get their act together in the near future. In fact, I hope to one day buy another Huawei phone and find myself pleasantly surprised… but right now, I would not recommend this phone to anyone.
