There has been a lot of conflicting information about Huawei’s relationship with America; the company was put on the so-called Entity List, that is, currently, American products and services can only be sold to the Chinese manufacturer based on a unique license. The USA lifted the ban relatively quickly, but only partially, and at the same time issued numerous temporary licenses to American companies to trade – and this was interpreted by many people (as well as us, by the way) to mean that Huawei’s things are back on track. However, it turned out at IFA that the situation is more complicated than that, and this means that it is far from certain that Huawei will stay with Android.
In the case of the operating system, the current licenses only guarantee that Huawei can continue to provide all the usual services for the existing product, but the company cannot release a new phone with Google services on it. Android can of course still be used, since it is open source, but the Play Store, Play services and Google apps cannot be installed on any new device. Huawei’s head of consumer products, Richar Yu, said at IFA that in this situation, there is no benefit for the company to use the Android OS – that is, if the situation does not change and Google services do not have the access, the phones will also be available in stores with Harmony OS. The first phone on which Huawei can install Harmony OS may be the P40, which will be released next spring.
Huawei’s position remains a key issue in the US-China trade war; and voices are growing louder that the Trump administration is playing a foul game. More and more American companies are standing up for Huawei, in addition to Google, Intel and Microsoft have also indicated that they do not agree with the way the American government is playing to disable the Chinese manufacturer.
Source: geeks.hu
