After getting caught boosting its benchmark scores, Huawei says it will let users access “performance mode” to speed up smartphones at the cost of battery life
Ashley Carman / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Huawei's response follows AnandTech's finding that its phones ship with a benchmark-detection tool that silently switches to a high-performance state when benchmark apps launch, so published scores never reflect everyday use. The company's defense — that competitors mislead consumers too — lands on fertile ground: OnePlus was caught doing the same with the OnePlus 5 the year before.
The concession is also a quiet admission about its own software claims: AnandTech's recent look at GPU Turbo found valid technology wrapped in overzealous marketing, and this is not Huawei's first hardware disclosure problem after the P10's mixed flash memory. Opening performance mode to users converts a hidden cheat into a visible trade-off.
First-order effects
- Buyers of current Huawei phones gain a user-facing toggle that delivers the boosted speeds previously reserved for benchmark runs, at an explicit battery-life cost they now control.
- Reviewers and benchmark sites lose their core complaint: scores from Huawei devices can now be reproduced in a mode any user can enable, removing the gap between tested and purchased performance.
Second-order effects
- Rivals named implicitly in Huawei's 'competitors do it too' rebuttal face pressure to match the same transparency or risk being the next vendor exposed by detection tools like AnandTech's.
- Benchmark publishers are pushed toward testing default states rather than out-of-box scores, since vendors have shown they will optimize specifically for the test harness.
Third-order effects
- If caught-and-conceded becomes the standard playbook — detect, deny, then democratize the cheat — synthetic benchmark scores lose credibility as a purchase signal, shifting comparison shopping toward sustained real-world performance and battery measurements.
- The pattern suggests benchmark manipulation is structural to Android's spec-driven marketing rather than a one-vendor offense, inviting independent labs and publications to become the de facto verification layer for phone performance claims.
The trend: Smartphone vendors increasingly treat benchmarks as a marketing surface to be gamed rather than a measurement to be passed, forcing the review ecosystem toward real-world testing as the trusted interface.