This past weekend, it was announced that Google would be revoking Huawei’s license to use the search giant’s services after the Chinese OEM was added to the United State’s Entity List, therefore blocking other companies from working with Huawei so long as they don’t have explicit government approval. this meant that Huawei would lose access to key services like the Play Store, Gmail, and certain aspects of the Android operating system. Luckily, one major issue with the license revoke Huawei was facing will be pardoned for three months.
According to the United States Commerce Department, Huawei will be able to ship software updates to its phones until August 19th. This gives the company three months to pump out any important security updates or major OS upgrades. If you aren’t familiar, Huawei doesn’t use its own software rollout system and instead uses Google’s, therefore requiring the two companies to be on good terms in order for upgrades to the former’s phones to be released.
The granted license the US is issuing today is “necessary to provide service and support, including software updates or patches, to existing Huawei handsets that were available to the public on or before May 16, 2019.” So if your phone was promised an upgrade at some point, expect it to ship in the near future.
It isn’t clear just how serious this revoke is to Huawei’s business. Not having access to the Play Store or other Google services on your phone is crippling for a lot of consumers around the world, so it should be interesting to see what Huawei’s next move will be when the August 19th date comes up.
