Huawei fans and users have received the worst kind of news on a Monday morning. The news is that Google has stopped business with Huawei “effective immediately”. This means that the company has lost access to Android OS and its updates. Google will also stop providing its apps to Huawei. We already know that Huawei is banned from selling their smartphones in the US. Now, this blacklisting from US Government means that Huawei is essentially dead in the US.
However, the worrying factor for Huawei is that it runs Android on its smartphones. And the termination of business from Google means they can no longer do that. So Huawei will have to run the AOSP version of Android on their smartphones. AOSP is the Android Open Source Project which is free as it is open source. However, Google provides Android updates to the AOSP version for its partner OEMs.
Along with Android, Google apps will also not be available on future Huawei phones. You will not see Google apps such as Gmail or Play Store on the next Huawei flagships. It is also likely that Huawei will stop selling smartphones outside China. But we are not sure if Huawei has any plans of stopping operations at the moment.
One interesting factor here is that Android updates for Huawei phones will likely be delayed. Because Google releases new Android versions for AOSP branch later than the official release. And Huawei will have to rely on AOSP only due to this ban. Huawei’s phones already run on AOSP in China as Google is banned in China. So no Google services are allowed in the country.
We expect that version of Android from Huawei to come to all Huawei phones soon. We might also see Huawei’s blacklisting being dropped but that is highly unlikely due to the tensions between the US and China.