Huawei managed to set the bar pretty high with its Mate 20 series last year. The company is rumored to unveil the Mate 30 series next month (Sept 18) and many expect the company to raise the bar in terms of smartphone imaging performance once again. However, even before its announcement, the Mate 30’s launch is in jeopardy due to the U.S. ban of Huawei.
In May this year, the U.S. government put Huawei on an Entity list which prevented US companies from working with it. This meant that Huawei lost its Android license and access to the Google Play suite. A month later, the company was given a 90-day extension to work with US companies but that extension only applied to existing products. This meant that Huawei could only roll out software updates and launch products that were already certified by Google. The company was once again given a 90-day extension that will expire in November but it has the same restriction: it only applies to older products. What this means is that Huawei cannot launch the Mate 30 series with Google Play suite of apps and services. This was confirmed to Reuters by a Google spokesman as well. More than 130 U.S. companies have applied for a license to work with Huawei but the government has not granted any of them any license yet. The ban and the restriction puts the Mate 30 series future in jeopardy. Huawei could go ahead and launch the Mate 30 series based on an AOSP version of Android but it would still not have access to the Google Play Store. Huawei launches its smartphones without the Google Play Suite in China but in other parts of the world, the Mate 30 series needs to have access to the Play Store suite for even being considered by consumers.
