Google confirms it won't be providing its apps to the Huawei Mate 30 range

[steven36]

China Dull

The wheels are coming off. As are the petals.

 

GOOGLE HAS confirmed that it won't be able to provide its full Android offering to Huawei for the upcoming launch of its Mate 30 handset range.

 

Huawei has been fighting a ban imposed by the Trump White House earlier this year, placing the company on its "Entity List" of companies which US firms cannot trade with, without a special licence. As of yet, no such licences have been issued.

 

Although Huawei has been working on its own operating system, HarmonyOS, it's not flagship ready, meaning that the Mate 30 will carry the open-source version of Android. That means no Play Store, no GMail, no Google Maps, no YouTube… no point amiright?

 

At present, the ban is not in full force, to allow partners of Huawei and other affected OEMs to service products that were available to the public before the crackdown. That temporary rest bite ends in November, but because neither the Mate 30 or Mate X folding phone are available currently, they will have to release those products under the restrictions.

 

For Chinese users, that's no biggy. Google hasn't operated in mainland China since 2009 and local users are used to third-party app stores, though they do represent the vast majority of malware infections on Android.

 

But for the European market, it's a disaster. Huawei can't say that "Nothing's changed" anymore. That slogan which has promoted the P30 range was true because the P30 scraped in under the wire of the ban.

 

Of course for regular Android-heads, this is all a bit melodramatic, because adding Google services to a device (a Fire tablet for example) takes less than 10 minutes.

 

But Huawei's ability to market the successor to the handsets that have made it a household name has been seriously impeded. And as for the Mate X being a rival to the Samsung Galaxy Fold?

 

Fergetabowdit.

 

Huawei relaunched the P30 range at IFA earlier this month adding new colours and Android 10, which won't be affected by the ban.

 

Source