The American government put Huawei in an Entity List in 2020, which meant that the Chinese company was not allowed to do business with American companies.
The most damaging part of the ban was the Huawei could, and still does not ship phones with Google Mobile Services (GMS) anymore, and this has had a catastrophic effect in markets outside china because their use cases entail Google apps and associated services.
Huawei tried to fight the ban and managed to get a temporary general license that has been renewed a couple in 2020.
The license allowed Huawei to send app and security updates to older devices that escaped the Google ban.
However, as of this past weekend, the license has since expired.
And according to the US Commerce Department, the license will not be renewed.
There are several inferences that can be made from the development: one, the future of software updates is bleak, mainly for devices that were released while Huawei was working with Google (before May 16, 2019); secondly, the Chinese corporation may not be able to distribute Gapps in software updates for affected smartphones; and lastly, Huawei may delay getting security patches updates from Google since the search giant releases them a month prior to roll-out by phone makers.
The impact of this restriction will be felt, but Huawei is prepping a September summit that may shed light on its future directions.
