The US Veto of Huawei is official. Problems Updating Their Mobiles

Older Huawei phones sold before May 16, 2019, when the ban on working with Huawei came into effect, until now had been exempt from the ban on using Google Mobile Services (GMS). This meant that while the brand’s newer phones could no longer run these GMSs , older phones could still receive updates for Android and operating system applications. Until now.

The Washington Post reveals that the fact that mobiles with Huawei’s Google services could continue to receive updates is due to the repeated Temporary General License (TGL) granted by the US government to the Chinese firm that allowed Google to continue sending new software versions to old Huawei phones . This license has come to an end last week, which could leave owners of older Huawei phones unable to receive critical security updates for the future.

And now that?

The purpose of these temporary licenses, or extensions, was to allow US companies to continue working with Huawei to provide software updates to operators using Huawei equipment. However, there are no more extensions to this license and it is not known if there will be. The US Commerce Department could still renew the temporary general license, but neither the agency nor Huawei have commented on it.

It is not clear at this time how exactly the expiration of the license will affect future software updates. Most likely, Huawei devices that already have Google applications, that is, those released before May 2019, will continue to have them, however Huawei will not receive support from Google if the changes they make in their builds break compatibility with the Google apps. Therefore, Huawei will have to be careful when releasing software updates if the TGL is not renewed, as it could lead to incompatibility problems.

And what about the new ones?

The models launched on the market after the Trump government’s ban, such as the Huawei Mate 30 or Huawei P40, have a version of Android AOSP that does not have the services of Google. For this reason, the support does not depend on the American company, but directly by Huawei, who may continue to provide updates only for this software in the form of new versions of EMUI.