Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Huawei Ban: Explained!”.
All right uh, we got a lot to talk about hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here and you may have recently seen some version of the news that huawei was cut off from google and now all their android devices are in limbo. But clearly, there’s a lot more to it. This is a super complex topic with policy and timelines and a whole bunch of moving parts. So i clearly didn’t rush this video out.
I wanted to actually take my time to summarize this topic, but here we are so. This is everything you need to know so far in one place, so huawei in case you didn’t already know based in china, huge company absolutely massive, and they have all kinds of businesses in tech. They sell networking equipment, they sell computers and they sell most, notably smartphones.
They are the number two largest by market share: smartphone vendor on planet earth; second, only to samsung and right above apple. So, as you may have heard, or read in the news over the past few months, the us and china have been escalating. This trade war from both sides plus there’s been a history of security concerns over the potential of u.s companies, buying huawei networking equipment and then possibly getting spied on by the chinese government. U.S government agencies were even banned from buying huawei phones at all. So, no matter how you view those things either way, huawei’s status in the us has been pretty shaky for a little while now for various reasons, they knew it. We knew it.
That’S just the climate we’re in so the big new news now is that the us government signed an executive order into effect that added huawei to effectively a black list of companies that are restricted from doing any business with any u.s company at all period. It’S been awarded a bunch of different ways, but that’s basically what went down and now the implications from that have run far and wide. I mean nothing’s really rocked the tech world quite like this, in a little while so the biggest most obvious headline from this is google they’re, a u.s company huawei does business with google. They make android phones.
So when this executive order came out in response, google complied by stopping all business with huawei and pulling their license to use android that wasn’t like a choice they made or a decision. They had really they’re just complying with the executive order. Google’S in the us huawei is not allowed to do business with any company in the u.s, so they can’t be sold any software or any licenses, so they can’t use android. So this is, of course, terrible news for huawei who, by the way, was the fastest growing smartphone manufacturer in the world. They were coming up, quick on that number one spot.
So now the big question we’re all wondering is what does this mean for the past? The present and future huawei devices so for huawei devices past and present, like if you own, a huawei phone like me like a p30 pro or you’re thinking about getting a p30 pro or a p30 here’s the deal. First of all, they were issued a 90-day exemption. So they will be able to continue sending software updates and security updates to existing huawei phones for the next 90 days into august, so that sort of softens the blow a little bit.
I guess – and i do believe this also includes honor by the way honor being a brand – that’s owned completely by huawei, a sub brand of them, but honor and huawei phones are all sort of under the same umbrella. So these phones will all still work and they’ll still keep getting. Software updates and also google tweeted from their android account that, while they comply with us government requirements, services like google play and security from google play protect, they will keep functioning on your existing huawei device. For now, but these phones, if things stay the way they are basically, these phones will most certainly stop getting software updates, like even if you’re, not in the us, no matter where you are, if your huawei phone runs, google services, those will stop and you’ll stop. These phones will not get the latest version of android, basically, at the end of this 90 day extension, whatever software version, these phones have is the one that they’ll have for the rest of their life, which is definitely not ideal. So what does huawei do from here? Like what can huawei do about their future phones and can huawei even make future phones without any us business help fun fact they spent 70 billion dollars buying components for hardware last year, 11 billion of that went to u.s companies like qualcomm, intel, etc, and actually arsenica Has posted an article with a pretty good breakdown of all the parts and components that huawei’s been buying to make their smartphones and a lot of them come from us companies, the gorilla glass, the flash storage, some radios etc? All from us from looking at this list, it doesn’t seem totally unrealistic that i mean they don’t want to obviously, but they seem like they could totally switch all of their suppliers from u.s companies to others to get around this. It’S not what they want to do. It involves spending a lot of money and doing a lot of work, but they’re one of the few oems that doesn’t rely on qualcomm for their silicon.
They make their own kieran 980 chip for the mate 20 pro and the p30 pro. So, in theory, with a lot of effort, they could keep making these physical phones and also bloomberg, has reported that huawei has built up a three-month stockpile of the parts they like to use ahead of this ban, which is actually pretty impressive, but even if they did Replace all of these hardware suppliers with alternatives in the next 90 days. The software is still the big question.
How do you make a phone without google without the android license without the google play store? Technically android itself is open source just bare bone stock. Android is just an open source project which has led many to speculate. You don’t need a license. You don’t need to do business with google to just use aosp, so they could use bone stock android, but that’s not ideal, because even that is further and further from the version google uses every day and that still doesn’t include things like google services gmail youtube. It’S just not ideal, the more i read into it.
It turns out huawei’s, been sort of quietly bracing themselves for something like this for a while, similar to samsung they’ve recognized their reliance on google and google services as a bad thing. So they’ve been slowly building things behind the scenes to be able to get ready to replace them supposedly they’ve been working on a backup os that supports android, apps and they’ve, been working on building their own app store. The problem is, that is an immense challenge: to try to get people to use an alternate os and an alternate app store, especially if it doesn’t look exactly the same as the one they’re used to especially the app store. And if you can’t do business with us.
Companies, you can’t expect to be able to negotiate your way into getting the netflix’s and pandoras and facebooks and instagrams on your alternate app store, and even if you can, we’ve seen others like amazon, try, you’ve seen the amazon app store right, amazon’s, a multi-billion dollar company And the sad version of an app store that they have is nowhere near a replacement of the ones that we’re used to. So it’s a super massive challenge to try to build up your own app store out of nowhere. So this spells a lot of work for huawei like it shows how big of an impact just getting cut from your ties with google, can have on your business. They’Ve seen this coming they’ve known that this is possible, but now that it’s happened, it’s awful.
So the way things stand now they could, in theory after the 90 days, is up continue to make phones entirely through nine us companies, but those phones wouldn’t have android. They wouldn’t have the google play services which are crucial and they wouldn’t have the google play store. It’S tough and, of course, it’s not just google that they’re cut off from like that.
That’S the big headlining one because they make a lot of android phones, but there’s plenty of other us companies that they do business with microsoft. Intel nvidia huawei has been making laptops and pretty good ones. Mind you competitively for a while now, but as far as i can tell, they can’t keep making windows laptops without doing business with microsoft and intel and nvidia, and these companies that’s brutal too.
So as a person that really likes tech, all of this news is terrible because having one less company means less competition, which is less incentive for these companies to work hard and make great stuff. I mean we’ve seen it ourselves with how good their phones have gotten lately and how good they’ve made all the phones around them. Even if you’re not a fan of huawei, or if you don’t like their stuff, we have to admit that having them around is good for consumers, it’s good for us and also side note if you think about it. This is also pretty bad, just specifically for folding phones like the galaxy fold kind of just had its own pr nightmare all by itself over there for a couple weeks, which sort of turned people’s heads to the other folding phone that would be coming to market soon, Which was gon na be the huawei mate x, but now i mean what, if it can’t even run android but hey huawei is, like i said, a huge company like a really huge company. So i guess, if anyone can recover from such a massive setback, to multiple parts of their business, i guess it’s them. I mean this is not ideal at all.
Their ideal case would be the government renegotiates things and they reverse the executive order and things go back to normal. But in the case that that doesn’t happen. At least they have billions of dollars to try something, but even if they do come back, if you think about it, the bigger damage might really just be the way people think about huawei as a company to potentially buy products from you know, their reputation isn’t exactly Great, especially in the us, so now good luck trying to convince someone to spend a thousand dollars instead of an iphone onto huawei phone that doesn’t even have the play, store or run android anymore.
That’S a tough sell! If you look back, a very similar situation happened to zte in 2018 last year they got cut off from all their us business relationships and they were never the same. They didn’t exactly come back strong from that. But huawei is this goliath, so i’m i’m thinking things will go a bit differently this time, or at least i’m hoping things will go differently for the sake of competition. But to be honest, this whole situation is far from over. These things evolve. They change over time. I wouldn’t be shocked if this whole thing was reversed in the next couple months, just because that’s sort of the way things have gone recently, but as of right now we’re just kind of in this unsatisfying limbo as we speculate about huawei’s future.
But that’s basically all there is to know right now there you have it so that’s been it i’ll, leave all the links for all my sources down below in case. You want to read up on this yourself and, of course, feel free to share this video for anyone who might be headline reading or curious about the situation. Huawei’S found themselves in right now and i’ll catch you guys in the next article peace .