At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I m going to remind you that Huawei and the U.S. are not great buddies at the moment thanks to the existence of an Entity List that excludes Huawei from doing business with American companies. The effects of this battle of egos have seen Huawei lose on a lot of things: its 5G plans have been undermined, and the sale of smartphones has been affected in markets outside China because, well, its current releases cannot ship with Google apps. The development made the Chinese manufacturer release its Mate 30 phones in select markets, and while it offers the best experience in all fronts, selling people a device that requires them to use other means to run essential apps is just not going to work.
In a couple of days, the P40 series of phones will be announced, mainly the P40 and P40 Pro, because the Lite version is already out. The announcement will be interesting because the tech world wants to know how Huawei will navigate the space to convince potential buyers that Google apps are not everything, hence they should just buy the smartphones and watch the space get a turnaround.
That turnaround, in this case, is multi-pronged. For example, Huawei is more than ever popularizing App Gallery and has hinted on plans to release an app store alongside China OEMs to take on Google Play. Huawei is also reported to be in talks with popular apps such as Facebook and its assortment of apps to strike a deal where those tools will be pre-loaded in their future releases, in this case, the P40 series. Huawei is also said to be testing a search app named Huawei Search, which is argued to be a replacement for the insanely popular Google Search.
Huawei Search is said to be part of the Huawei Ecosystem according to groups that have since tested the tool. However, the app does not seem to bring anything noteworthy to the table – considering the likes of Google Search have been imparted with so many features such as Discover that have effectively made them key essentials for millions of people. Huawei Search, to this end, is said to pull the basics from the world wide web, which is images, articles, and videos.
No word from Beijing has supported the true intent of Huawei Search, but we can fill in the blanks with what we have at our disposal: the company will try, or is already in the process of cloning popular apps for a possible solo sojourn in the mobile space in the coming days because the Entity List is hurting it. Huawei, among other Chinese companies, is, however, no stranger to replicating popular services for its market because the Asian country enforces some of the world’s harshest censorship laws that have banned Western services for China-made replacements.
