Last week, the future of Huawei came crumbling down after United States added Huawei to its ‘Entity List’, meaning US companies can’t do business with Huawei without explicit government approval. The most hard hitting on Huawei is Google, since the Chinese OEM relies on the Google’s open mobile OS. This means future phones from the company won’t have access to the Play Store and other services.
Reuters reports that Google has stopped providing Huawei with hardware and software products, except those covered by open source licenses. In other words, while Huawei can still use Android itself, most proprietary services will be inaccessible — including the Google Play Store, Gmail, and presumably anything else that requires the closed-source Play Services Framework.
The exact details are still being discussed internally at Google, according to a source that spoke with Reuters. The move could also prevent from updating its existing phones, this affects the future of Huawei as the updates can’t be re-certified for Play Store access, risking the security of Huawei device owners. While security updates are part of AOSP and are still available to Huawei, Android’s system WebView is updated through the Play Store, and Play Protect is a core part of Google’s Android services.
If this ends up being true, it would be a critical blow to Huawei’s smartphone business. While the company could theoretically partner with non-American companies to provide alternatives to Google’s applications (or use the in-house operating system it has been working on for a while), the lack of Play Store access would be a major drawback to any potential buyers and the future of Huawei. Huawei already has clones of many popular services in its home country, including an app store, but most of those services are currently limited to China.
Google’s statement
“We are complying with the order and reviewing the implications. For users of our services, Google Play and the security protections from Google Play Protect will continue to function on existing Huawei devices.”
Huawei’s Statement
Huawei will continue to provide security updates and after-sales services to all existing Huawei and Honor smartphone and tablet products, covering those that have been sold and that are still in stock globally.
We will continue to build a safe and sustainable software ecosystem, in order to provide the best experience for all users globally.
According to WinFuture, the Chinese government has responded cautiously to the news and says it is closely monitoring the situation.
