When Huawei introduced the Mate 30 series in September, it did it without Google services. This is to do with a trade war between the United States and China that landed the Shenzhen firm on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List, meaning that U.S. companies are banned from doing business with Huawei. That means that it can’t license Android from Google, Windows 10 from Microsoft, buy parts from Qualcomm or Intel, and so on.
In a somewhat unsurprising twist, Huawei told Austrian site Der Standard that even when this ban is lifted, it’s not planning to go back to Google services. It’s probably pretty obvious, but the reason is that the firm doesn’t want to have to rely on U.S. technologies for fear of yet another ban. Instead, it wants to create a third smartphone ecosystem that stands next to iOS and Android.
Creating a third smartphone ecosystem is no small order, as many have tried. The most notable is Microsoft with Windows Phone, but there have been various other smaller contenders. The one thing that Huawei has in its corner is that its OS is still Android, albeit the open-source version of Android that doesn’t have Google services. Still, it maintains compatibility with many apps.
According to Der Standard, Huawei Mobile Services has about 4,000 developers working on it, and the Chinese firm will spend three billion dollars on its development this year alone. On top of that, it will spend a billion dollars on marketing HMS outside of China, meaning that the company is most certainly still planning on going global. Apparently, Huawei has already replicated 24 out of 60 Google services.
Huawei has a long road ahead of itself here, and it knows that. Its own app store is lacking a lot of popular U.S. apps, apps that are banned by the Chinese government. These include things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Apparently, the Chinese company might set up a European company to make it easier to do business.
Huawei has issued a statement to Neowin saying, “An open Android ecosystem is still our first choice, but if we are not able to continue to use it, we have the ability to develop our own.” In content, this response from the company doesn’t deny the original statements it made regarding excluding Google apps and services from future devices.
