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The US-based tech giant Google has confirmed that it has suspended business activity with Chinese tech giant Huawei that involves the transfer or hardware, software, and key technical services. The ban on Huawei is due to the US govt’s strict policy for Chinese companies as President Donald Trump has barred US companies from engaging in technology services trade with foreign companies poised to threaten American national security.
In simple words, it means that Huawei has lost access to Android license, effective immediately, complete with Google services and will instead have to use an open-source version for future smartphones. Though the new decision doesn’t affect current users of Huawei devices and they will continue to receive security updates and after-sales services, covering those which have been sold or still in stock globally.
According to market researchers, this ban on Huawei could cause big problems for the company internationally, where nearly half of its smartphone shipments go. Other Huawei suppliers, including Qualcomm and Intel, will also not sell to the Chinese firm until further notice. Though Huawei will greatly suffer from the recent breakup and it is going to be a humongous task for Huawei to develop its own branded Android compatible app store but breaking ties with Huawei will also hurt Google a lot.
In my opinion, these are the five things that will hurt Google most.
1. Google will lose millions of Play Store users
Huawei is the 2nd largest phone maker in the world with around 20% market share in the global smartphone shipments and the stats from Q1 2019 revealed that Huawei shipped around 60 million phones in that quarter. Google’s move to ban Huawei’s upcoming devices from using Play Store would eventually result in the huge drop of Google Play Store users which will impact developers all over the world.
2. No. of Android OS users will see a major downfall
Restricting upcoming Huawei phones from Android OS platform could be the biggest mistake of Google as the company will lose a major chunk from the OS industry. If Huawei smartphone users in future don’t access Google’s proprietary services like Gmail, Google Play, Google Search and other apps, the tech behemoth will have to face the consequences through a sharp decline in their revenues.
3. Huawei could still use Android open source platform without paying Google
Huawei will have to manually access any updates or software patches from Android Open Source Project — the code accessible to all outside programmers — to distribute the updates to users itself. So, in that case, Huawei will not have to pay Google for the Open Sourced work. However, licensed products like the Gmail app and Google Maps may not work in upcoming Huawei phones.
4. Huawei may introduce its own OS — a competitor for Android
According to Android Authority and other authentic international media outlets, Huawei has been working on its own operating system for the last seven years whose name could be “Hongmeng”. As of now, it appears like Huawei correctly foresaw the future as the recent ban by Google might force the company to launch its own OS or look for alternatives as soon as possible. This means that Google is getting a competitor for Android very soon.
5. Android app developers will lose millions of users
Many developers around the globe build apps for Android. This would be quite annoying for Android App developers as they will lose millions of users from their apps available in the Google Play Store.
