This politically-fueled situation will cause issues not only for Huawei and Android users, but for all smartphone users as well…

As some of you may know by now, the U.S. government blacklisted Huawei as a company last week, which has now caused Google (along with multiple other U.S. tech companies) to be forced to stop working with Huawei. This has led to Google withdrawing Huawei’s Android license, effectively banning it from using Google’s official version of Android and cutting off current Android phones from getting Android software updates and future phones from not having access to Google’s services on those phones as well. Now for some, this may not seem like a big deal, but this recent move by the U.S. government could cause problems not just for Huawei and Huawei device users, but potentially for Android users and even iOS users as well.

Now let’s start for explaining why this whole ban has happened in the first place. A lot of you may bring up security issues that the U.S. has had with Huawei since late last year, but for anyone who really has been following up on that story, there is still no proof that Huawei has actually been spying on US citizens, leaving a simple but honest truth about why all this is happening: The US-China trade war. China and the United States have been locked in a battle of tariffs, taxes and various other trade logistics for a while now, and despite knowing how critical China is to the global trade market ( if not because of it) President Donald Trump has been leveraging the ambitions of Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE in the U.S. to try and get a better and more advantageous deal for America. In fact he even banned the use of ZTE devices earlier and revoked them once the Chinese started spelling out the terms he liked. The only difference in this scenario, is that ZTE is nowhere near as large or influential as Huawei is to the rest of the world, neither were the terms it was given as impactful.

Google revoking Huawei’s Android license cripples the company just as it was getting much better at being an international brand. For the past two years Huawei has started matching and even surpassing the standards of companies like Samsung and Apple not only from a hardware perspective, but a software one as well, and cutting off that software relationship it had with Google will demolish it’s international appeal. Allow us to show you how:

1. Current Phones losing Android updates:

Now to be fair, this one may not affect too many people in Zim. Smartphone OS updates for Android and even iOS have never been at the top of the list for a lot of us, but they do matter. iPhones have actually had longer lasting value against many Android competitors because Apple supports them for up to five years, and Huawei (and Honor phones by extension) phones which have just started to be viewed as worthy competitors to the Apples and Samsungs of this world, will now be relegated backwards because they don’t have the same long lasting software support.

2. New phones won’t come with Google’s version of Android or Google Apps.

Huawei will still have access to the Android Open Source Project or AOSP for short, which basically means they can build their own version of android like Amazon does with its Kindle Fire tablets. The problem with this, among other things is Huawei users buying new phones will also not have Google’s app suite, which some of you may not think matter but let’s start here: you won’t have the Play Store. That’s right, the biggest store and app selection on Android won’t be available to you, at least not without some tinkering. Along with that you will lose Google Maps, Gmail, Google Drive , Chrome and a whole host of useful Google apps we take for granted but will now have to jump through hoops to get or learn to live without. You won’t even be able to move contacts from you other Android phone through the cloud like you can today. And WhatsApp cloud backups may not work either.

3. Current phones MAY also eventually lose Google’s apps and services.

Just to make it worse, current Android phones, especially those who get regular Android updates , security or otherwise, may lose those same Google Apps because of compatibility issues. Hence you could theoretically wake up finding you Play Store or some other Google apps not functioning. Now again, this fact isn’t for certain, and hopefully Huawei finds a way to make sure glitches like this don’t happen.

 

This potentially goes beyond Huawei

As much as you may be reading this and going “poor Huawei fans” however, the U.S. government on Huawei can affect not just them and their products, but could spread into multiple Android smartphone makers, Chinese or otherwise, and smartphones in general as a whole. You see, as we stated before, the US-China trade war is at the centre of this, and political opinions on Donald Trump aside, he seems capable of banning and blacklisting a lot of other Chinese smartphone companies to further his advantage in these trade negotiations. This means a lot of other Chinese smartphone makers getting banned by Google as well, including OnePlus, Oppo, ZTE, iTel and perhaps even Motorola and Nokia as well which are Chinese owned and China has a huge stake in their ownership respectively. But that’s just the start of it, China has become such a huge threat to the U.S. economically due to being the “World’s workbench” , meaning every major company on this earth has some version of a manufacturing plant in China. And if China were to begin to get as petty as Trump, there is the chance that it starts putting outrageous conditions on U.S. products made in China which include the iPhone and Google Pixel devices, not to mention an endless number of laptops companies like Microsoft , Apple and Dell manufacture there as well. And this is all without considering import tariffs on non-Chinese products that would still be manufactured in China such as Samsung devices. This could lead to a price increase in almost every smartphone people use along with an endless list of other tech products. Hence due to an attack on Huawei, a company partially owned by and close to the Chinese government, we may have a fallout on most tech products as we know them, similar to how the murder of relatively unknown Ferdinand caused the First World War and the death of countless lives. Simply put, we hope Trump pulls another ZTE and suddenly revokes the ban on Huawei, because if this situation is to continue to escalate, we may have a situation that could change the landscape of tech for years, and not for the better.

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