Today, Huawei announced their latest smartphones, the Mate 30 and the Mate 30 Pro. They have the best hardware the company has presented so far, but there is a lingering problem: the software.
The US government placed Huawei on an entity list which barred US companies to trade with Huawei. This meant that Huawei couldn’t ship the Mate 30 series phones with Google apps and services.
“We cannot use the Google Mobile Services core, we can use the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) core,” Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer products CEO said. This means that Huawei is forced to use the HMS core for the Mate 30 series of phones.
However, Huawei has a plan for that. The company announced that they will use $1 billion to fund the development, marketing and growth of Huawei Mobile Services
Currently, Huawei’s Mobile services have over 570 million monthly active users who make 180 billion downloads yearly in Huawei’s own App Gallery.
The company says that 45,000 apps already integrate with Huawei Mobile services. However, there will be a ton of apps that need to be made available to Huawei’s App Gallery and that’s why Huawei has dedicated resources to makes sure that happens.
Huawei will have a lot of work ahead to convince developers to work on porting these apps to the App Gallery as well as convincing consumers that their version of Android based on the Android Open Source Project will be practical to them.
It is kind of sad the Huawei Mate 30 series of phones won’t ship with Google services despite their amazing hardware. The phone will sell fine in China where they are already used to not having Google services on their Android phones but it will have a huge task selling elsewhere.
