I am looking forward to attending the global launch of the brand new HONOR 20 Series at Battersea Evolution, London, SW8 tomorrow afternoon. HONOR are Huawei’s sub-brand and I was saddened this morning to read, in conjunction with my press invitation, a notice from Google cutting Huawei’s access to key Android apps and services following the United States’ move to blacklist the tech company. Essentially, Google has ceased to provide software and support to Huawei as part of President Trump’s blacklisting of the company and affiliates.
So, what does this mean if you own, at the least, one of the 59 million Huawei or Honor smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2019? Well, you will still be able to use your smartphone, it means that Huawei has to supply its own updates from SOSP to the version of Android running on its phones, rather than Google’s updates. It does this anyway, for its own domestic market in China. But it does mean that any new additions Google make to Android via their Google Play Services framework, will no longer be available to Huawei for its western phones.
Huawei apparently were not taken by surprise by this announcement and are said to have had a Plan B in place for a while, which includes working on its own operating system, they already have this in place in their smartwatches.
But this is an extremely bad day for Huawei, not only for their smartphones but also to their computer business…watch this space for further updates…
