Huawei Smartphones To Stop Receiving Android Updates As Google Suspends Business Relations With Huawei
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has time and again faced backlash for its ties with the Chinese government. It has been accused of stealing its user’s data and sending it back to the home country for spying purposes. In what could be a major blowback to the company’s imperative business, American technology giant Google has suspended the majority of its business with the company. This insinuates that going forward, Huawei and it’s subsidiary Honor’s devices will not receive Android security updates. They will also lose access to the search engine giant’s popular services such as Maps and YouTube.
What Does This Mean?
For Huawei users' questions regarding our steps to comply w/ the recent US government actions: We assure you while we are complying with all US gov't requirements, services like Google Play & security from Google Play Protect will keep functioning on your existing Huawei device.
— Android (@Android) May 20, 2019
The aforementioned suspension of business will take place between Huawei and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. With this in effect, the existing and future smartphones from the former will stop receiving monthly security updates from Google. These are important for keeping the device up to date and safe from newly discovered malware. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the handsets from the Chinese OEM will also lose access to services like the Google Play, YouTube and Google Maps. Notably, the suspension does not affect the existence of Android on Huawei smartphones. This is because the suspension is not applicable on open source software and as is implied, Android is an open source software. But, the Chinese company will only be able to use the public version of the operating system and not the one made available by Google.
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The suspension of business by Alphabet on Huawei takes place after the United States government added the latter to its trade blacklist. It was added to the aforementioned list on Thursday and it means no American firm can engage in business with the Chinese company until explicitly given permission by the US government. In a post on microblogging website Twitter, the official account of Android has assured existing Huawei users that the suspension does not affect existing devices from the company. Present users of all Huawei and Honor handsets will keep featuring the Play Store and receive app updates via the software.
