This is definitely not the news Huawei mobile owners were looking to hear on their Sunday afternoons. According to a source at Reuters close to Google, they have decided to distanced themselves from the Chinese OEM. 

“Huawei Technologies Co Ltd will immediately lose access to updates to the Android operating system, and the next version of its smartphones outside of China will also lose access to popular applications and services including the Google Play Store and Gmail app,” Reuters noted (full article here).

On Wednesday, May 15, Trump signed an executive order to create a trade black list that and has included Huawei on the list. While updates for Google play apps and services will still go through because they do not need to interact with Huawei, OS & security updates have ceased with immediate effect. 

Huawei will only have access to the public version of the Android Open Source Project but will stop providing access to technical support nor will they be collaborating on proprietary apps or services moving forward.

Huawei has said they have been preparing for this event for the last 6 years and are well prepared to deal with this event. 

It’s good to note that you can access a variety of the popular apps like Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram through the App gallery (Huaweis App Store). This is a major blow for Huawei, as they are currently on their most successful run to date in the industry and are set to announce the Honor 20 on Mate 21, which is the successor to one of the most popular devices in 2018, the Honor 10.

As always, we will keep you posted on the developments to see how the Huawei ban affects us here in the Caribbean. I have already reached out to Huawei Trinidad and will keep you up to date when I get more information.