Huawei P9 review: great camera, design, and build quality but the Android 6.0-based Emotion UI skin and other software tweaks to stock Android hinder usability
Huawei P9 review: Great camera, great design, and ghastly software — Android 6 Marshmallow with Emotion UI 4.1
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands mid-arc for Huawei's flagship push: the P9 is the moment the company's Leica-branded dual camera and metal build start earning top marks from Western reviewers, with Ars Technica crediting the camera, design, and build quality outright.
But the same review flags the Android 6.0-based Emotion UI skin as a usability drag versus stock Android — a complaint that recurs almost verbatim down the line, from the P10's UI issues to the Mate 10 Pro's buggy $800 software and the P30 Pro's "buggy and unappealing" skin. The pattern is consistent enough that software, not hardware, becomes Huawei's recurring review liability.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between the P9 and stock-Android rivals like the Pixel XL face a trade-off the review makes explicit: best-in-class camera and build on one side, an Emotion UI skin that actively hinders usability on the other.
- Huawei gets strong reviewer validation on exactly the dimensions it can control in-house — camera tuning, industrial design, build quality — while ceding ground on the software layer it layers over Google's Android 6.0.
Second-order effects
- Every subsequent Huawei flagship review through the Mate 10 Pro and P30 Pro repeats the same hardware-praise/software-fault split, turning Emotion UI into a standing discount on otherwise premium-priced devices and giving stock-Android competitors a ready-made differentiator.
- Because the criticism targets Huawei's own skin rather than Android itself, pressure lands on Huawei's software team to clean up Emotion UI — while Google's stock Android benefits by comparison at no cost of its own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Huawei's premium ambitions rest on closing a persistent software gap that five years of reviews show hardware excellence alone hasn't erased — a structural weakness that matters more as flagships converge on comparable cameras and builds.
The trend: Huawei's flagship reviews from the P9 onward trace a widening gap between class-leading hardware and a software skin that reviewers consistently penalize, making software the company's durable competitive liability.