Phones of many Chinese brands were removed from display shelves at domestic retail systems on the afternoon of November 4, suspected because the Weather application contained illegal maps.

Representatives of two of the four largest retail systems in Vietnam confirmed the incident and said they will soon return the machines to display shelves this week after "resolving the software issue".

Previously, an internal notice of a retail system marked "urgent" spread online with a request for employees to remove all goods displayed on the table and store them until further notice. Applicable brands include Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, Honor, Tecno, Honor, Nubia, Meizu. The requirement also applies to old machines as well as stopping the re-purchasing of products of the above brands from customers.

Mr. Hoang Tung, representative of a phone importer, said that the incident may have originated from the Weather application of Chinese smartphones. When accessing and viewing rainfall forecasts for each area, the map displays illegal maps, seriously violating Vietnamese sovereignty.

According to a technology expert, while phone versions in the Chinese market often have map applications from domestic developers such as Baidu pre-installed, these smartphone brands, when officially sold in Vietnam and internationally, replace them with Android's default Google Maps. However, most devices keep the Weather application with the "core" map from the Chinese developer, because Google does not have a similar alternative service.

A phone company representative confirmed that the company tried to resolve the software problem on the afternoon of November 4. According to him, the upgrade for the application was completed by engineers in a few hours, waiting for updates on the application store for all affected devices. Similarly, Xiaomi also said that it is accelerating application modifications and will have an upgrade tomorrow.

According to a representative of a retail system, the time to remove the device from the display shelf was initially expected to last until the end of the week but "may soon return to normal in the next 1-2 days".