Huawei Mate 30 series to launch without Google’s help

It’s been a bumpy year for Huawei. On one hand, the Chinese smartphone giant is surfing the choppy waves of the global smartphone shipment decline just fine, having grown 4.6% year-on-year from Q2 2018-2019 according to CounterPoint Research. This growth is no doubt bolstered by the runaway success of its P20 Series of phones from earlier this year, which the company called its most popular ever after shipping 16 million units in its first six months on the market.

Huawei’s Mate series has also proved wildly popular, with its Mate 20 series of fall 2018 having shipped 10 million units in its first five months of release. Expectations are high for the newest iteration, the P30, to surpass those numbers upon its unveiling in September 2019. This brings us to the other hand - its struggles with sanctions imposed by the United States government, which has gone through imposition, then partial repeal, and then strict enforcement of what has remained. The effects of these sanctions are finally being felt, as the new P30 line will be shipping without pre-installed Google apps, a Google spokesperson confirmed through news portal AsiaOne in late August.

The effects of the sanctions, combined with the previously erected tariff barriers on Chinese firms from the Trump administration, have mostly affected the behind-the-scenes of phone manufacturing. Huawei has historically bought a lot of its technology from U.S. companies, especially from makers of microprocessors and chipsets that go into smart-phones. Micron Technologies, Qualcomm, Qorvo and Skyworks Solutions all have listed Huawei as a major customer in their annual reports. As such, a lot of channels previously open are now closed. Now, the effects of the United States-China trade war will now be visible to consumers.

Does it matter that die-hard Huawei fans who flock to scoop up their newest creation won’t be able to immediately use apps like Gmail or Google Maps? It seems most people regard the pre-installation of the Google family of apps, which are numerous, as a nuisance rather than a benefit. Your average consumer may not be so sad to see them go.