Huawei Mate 30 Cut Off From Google Apps

The US blacklisting of Chinese tech giant Huawei is starting to bite after a workaround that allowed its users of the flagship Mate 30 smartphone to download Google apps, was cut off.

In August Huawei users were warned that its flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, would not be launched with Google apps such as YouTube, GMail or Google Maps.

However, security researcher John Wu had published a blog post that explained how users of Huawei’s Mate 30 Pro were able to manually download and install Google apps.

US blacklist

This was despite the fact that President Trump famously blacklisted the Chinese firm in May this year, over national security concerns – concerns which the firm has always denied.

The workaround explained by Wu involved Huawei smartphone users downloading and installing an APK from https://www.lzplay.net/

Users then followed the in app instructions, and could then download Google apps onto their devices.

But once news of this workaround got out, the Mate 30 devices lost their clearance to manually install Android apps, as reported by a number of smartphone experts, Bloomberg reported.

According to the report, Mate 30 devices had passed Google’s SafetyNet anti-abuse check last week.

But this week sees the Mate 30 Pro fail SafetyNet, and only Google is able to make that kind of change.

Google however declined to comment for the Bloomberg story.

Android woes

The Mate 30 is designed to work with 5G networks and is the first flagship device from Huawei since the trade war escalation between US President Donald Trump and China.

Shortly after the May blacklist move the US granted a 90-day temporary licence, which expired on Monday, 19 August.

The US government then announced a second temporary reprieve in August, but the reprieve does not apply to new products such as the Mate 30.

Huawei for its part has previously said it planned to continue using Google’s Android operating system for its smartphones for the time being, but could make the switch to its newly introduced HarmonyOS “at any time”.

The first device to use Harmony, which is known as Hongmeng in China, is a television bearing the Honor brand that went on sale in China in August.

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