Huawei responds to Twitter images being mysteriously deleted

A number of confused users buzzed on Reddit when they began to see strange behavior with the Twitter app on Huawei smartphones. The app was seemingly deleting photos immediately after the user saved them to the device using the Twitter app.

After saving the image, users could see a message from “Huawei System Services” that said “Twitter has deleted a photo from Gallery”. This caused an uproar on the internet that led many to believe that Huawei was intentionally blocking users from saving images from Twitter using some kind of feature baked into the OS.

Via Reddit

Huawei has released a statement regarding the behavior and explains why this is happening.

Having investigated the issue, Huawei has discovered that whenever users of certain devices download an image using specific builds of the Twitter app (version 7.78.0 and 7.77.0), the app will automatically create a folder of the same name as the image and promptly delete it in the background. This action triggers Huawei’s built-in image protection alert, causing the system to notify the user of the deletion. However, the images are not affected. Users may find their images at the following location: File Manager/picture/Twitter.

This sounds more like a glitch than anything but it is unclear whether Twitter needs to issue a fix or if Twitter and Huawei both have to collaborate to fix the issue at hand.

Huawei is currently in conversation with Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Huawei remains committed to delivering the best user experiences.

Images weren’t actually being deleted, according to the statement. It had to do with the way that the Gallery sees images and the way that the Twitter app interacts with an image behind the scenes in the process of saving it. It just turned out that EMUI was unaware of what the app was doing.

Did you experience this on your Huawei or Honor phone? We want to know about it! Leave a comment with what phone this happened to you on.

Reddit thread