When US President Donald Trump signalled the other day that he had allowed US companies to “keep selling that product” to Huawei we assumed that it meant that Huawei would be back in business as usual. Unfortunately he did not tell the entire truth, rather going for the big announcement without the actual truth.
It seems that, to protect US interests, products will only be allowed to be sold to Huawei if said product is widely available from other countries. What this means for Huawei and Android is still unclear and today Huawei have come out and said exactly that.
We acknowledge President Trump’s comments related to Huawei over the weekend and will wait for guidance from the Department of Commerce but have nothing further to add at this time.Tim Danks, Huawei VP
Of course Android and Google Play Store is only available from Google but there are alternatives available elsewhere in the world such as their own HongMeng OS which they have been furiously finalising leading up to the final cutoff date of the Entity List extension. There is also Sailfish OS along with a few other small operating systems looking to be the next Android.
Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei was playing it cool though, perhaps hinting that Huawei will continue to be a force even without US help:
President Trump’s statements are good for American companies. Huawei is also willing to continue to buy products from American companies. But we don’t see much impact on what we are currently doing. We will still focus on doing our own job right.
We can only hope that the US Department of Commerce sees that without Android on their phones Huawei will turn to a different OS which would mean millions and millions of phones will now be running something other than Google’s Android – a US product. Surely this is the whole reason behind the qualifier in doing business with Huawei — to protect US businesses from losing out to others in the world marketplace.
Just as Huawei are doing we are also waiting on the US government to decide on the Android situation and until we hear form them everything else is hypothesising and conjecture. No one knows for sure but fingers crossed Huawei can continue in the Android world.
Wise move by Huawei to continue down it’s own path at this stage I think , firstly because anything spanky says looking at his past history , you have to take with a very huge grain of salt.
And whatever spanky says today , he is just as likely to do an about face tommorow .