With Huawei now counting the days until the security measure issued by the United States government earlier this month once again takes full effect and continues crippling its relationship with Google, the company resolved to circulate a transcript of a concise Q&A organized with some media partners several days back. The goal of the summary is to clarify what exactly its customers who rely on Huawei- and Honor-branded smartphones on a daily basis can expect once the Android ban that caused a global panic ten days ago resumes, which is set to happen in the second half of August.
In short, the consensus industry watchers reached shortly after the mid-May ban was first publicized was pretty much spot-on. What that means is that if you happen to have a Huawei or Honor smartphone on your hands, there’s nothing to worry about, at least until 2019 is over; the Shenzen-based company confirmed it’s able to continue delivering optimized versions of Google’s security patches to its devices which won’t have their access to any core services from Alphabet’s subsidiary cut off. Play Store, Gmail, Drive, Google Assistant, all of those apps will always work on any Huawei device currently in use or on sale.
Even if one was to perform a factory reset on an Android device from the Chinese firm that originally launched with Google Play Services and any other piece of technology licensed from the Mountain View-based juggnernaut, they would not lose access to those solutions.
The situation is obviously a lot more complicated when it comes to major operating system upgrades. When asked whether its smartphones that launched with Android 9 Pie or older versions of the world’s most popular mobile OS will eventually be upgraded to Android Q, Huawei declined to answer, simply stating more details on its update plans will be revealed in changelogs of future firmware packages distributed to its devices over the air. PR speak aside, what that essentially means is that the company has no way of knowing where it will stand in regards to its ability to procure a contemporary Android license several months from now.
Even if Washington was to iron out its issues with China, which is what many believe is the crux of the issue surrounding Huawei’s newest predicament, and consequently lifted its sanctions off of the firm, the fact that its Android Q practices have been halted last week also indicates the manufacturer would take longer to distribute the new firmware to the eligible portion of its portfolio.
Furthermore, given how China has been blocking Google-made apps and cloud software for many years now, the U.S. ban will have no effect on Huawei’s operations in its home country, the handset maker confirmed.
One final tidbit from the Q&A session that’s perhaps the most notable of the lot has to do with Huawei‘s immediate plans; even though the company is understood to have ramped up its efforts to create an Android alternative in response to the dramatic Trump ban, its official stance on the matter is that it contributed too much to the development of the open-source OS to simply drop it. Instead, it’s committed to continue treating the development of its custom Android implementation called EMUI as its first mobile priority.