The US-Sino trade war started in 2019 has affected both Huawei and the subsidiary company Honor, making many people learn the hard way that there is life without apps and services provided by Google. No YouTube, Gmail, Waze/Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Play Store, and others – none of these were present on many Huawei and Honor smartphones after the ban.
GSMArena brings the news that many of us were waiting for: Honor is preparing a new line of phones able to support Google Services. According to an insider, the split from Huawei means that current Honor smartphones will run AppGallery. As for the new devices, they’ll have no easy access to the HMS universe.
Huawei is still on top
Despite the ban issued by the Trump administration, the top Chinese manufacturer Huawei currently maintains itself comfortably on the top 3 of the most popular smartphone brands, after Samsung and Apple. For a significant part of 2020, Huawei even managed to become the second-biggest phone company after Samsung. In the lack of apps and services from Google, including the Android operating system, Huawei implemented its own operating system known as HarmonyOS. According to a company executive from the Chinese brand, HarmonyOS is able to deliver an ecosystem that can pose competition to those offered by Google and Apple.
Eric Tan, who is Huawei’s vice president of consumer cloud services in the consumer business, declared:
We have the confidence to be one of the top ecosystem developers in the world.
On the list of the most popular Honor smartphones, we encounter products such as Honor 20, Honor 9X, Honor 20 Pro, Honor 20 Lite, Honor 8X, and Honor View 20. It will be interesting to see how future smartphones built by the Chinese brand will be affected by the new move and how similar they will be to the previous-mentioned list.
