Huawei Mate 30 & Pro lose ability to sideload Google apps
October 4, 2019Photo Credit:”Source:Google”
The ongoing trade war between China and the US has caused significant ripples in the tech industry, especially for Huawei who has had to deal with the brunt of it. What made matters worse is that the company has also been accused of foul play by the US and as such has resulted in them being blocked from using US tech in their devices.
That is why the Mate 30 and the Mate 30 Pro, Huawei’s halo devices, were launched without Google’s Mobile Services that include Google Play, Gmail, Drive and other apps in the Android Ecosystem. That said, technically it was still running Android, and so, more advanced users found away to circumvent the ban. All you had to do was to manually download the necessary APK and install said apps yourself.
Apparently, this is no longer possible, because an article published on Bloomberg states that this type of workaround is no longer valid. The original article by John Wu, which was published on medium.com, provides a detailed look into how its done as well as the principles of the backdoor Huawei has in its phones that allows the installation of such APKs, provided that its creators furnish the necessary documents.
In a nutshell, as of now, side loading GMS APKs yourself as you would on a Kindle or similarly limited Android device, is now impossible. The permissions granted by the Android OS to manually install the GMS APK has been revoked for the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro. For a successful installation, the digital signatures of both the software and the one residing in the operating system have to match.
Google has not made a statement regarding this issue, but many outlets are suggesting that a complex action like this, could only come from one place, but that has yet too be verified.
Source: medium.com, Bloomberg
