Huawei Mate 30 phones launch without Google apps | Hacker News Reader

Huawei Mate 30 phones launch without Google apps

bbc.co.uk

139 pointsamaccuish145 comments

Would've been a golden opportunity to get a billion users onto F-Droid's store, but, more likely Huawei will simply launch with their own, tightly-integrated "Huawei app store". It may even be worse from a security perspective, since there is zero expectation that the apps Huawei provides through their own store should be FLOSS.

If im not mistaken chinese manufacturer all run their own store in China.

That's true. Integrating 10+ different billing API is expected if you want good coverage, which is totally not fun

> Would've been a golden opportunity to get a billion users onto F-Droid's store

I agree that F-Droid missed a golden opportunity to work with a company to provide potentially millions of users with more control over their devices.

As much as I like F-Droid, it really needs some improvements to be considered a competitor to the Google Play Store. First and foremost, they need a system where you can rate and review the apps.

Disagree. All it needs is a couple of curated/reliable repositories doing the rating. ( They can even be commercial. ) A scaleable and easy job because it's all "free", thus it creates a social web of trust among curators & end user alike; beating the Google Play Store due to effectively not having a ton of taurus feces apps. It has the potential to not only make money, but save a ton too.

No, reviews aren't important. Whether it's apps, books, movies or music, trusting a review only makes sense if you value the reviewer and I don't know if you've read reviews of Android apps but it's the same morons who are posting on YouTube, Reddit etc. Thanks but I'll decide what to install via other means.

There are morons everywhere, but humans are generally correct in the aggregate. See examples here: https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/the-wisdom-of-cro...

Just slap a captcha on there or something or avoid bots

I stopped trusting reviews many years ago.

They are like the comment section under an article: useless.

While I generally agree that they can be useless, they can also help in searching and finding quality content. If you're getting a bunch of fake negative reviews then that is a different problem.

Fake negative are one thing.

Fake positives are much more common with products.

I'd rather have a search engine on the app that provides me a relevant list of results.

I mean I know the capabilities are limited because the search is supposed to work offline and doesn't call home for help, but if you don't know the exact name of the app you're looking for, then the experience is a little more tedious.

Now app developers have a big incentive to avoid Google Play Services and run on open-source Android. That lets them run on Google, Huawei, and F-Droid platforms.

Time for a dev forum on migrating away from Google Play Services.

You could say the same about Vulkan vs Metal, or Chrome vs the world, or Windows vs the world. The bulk of developers are going to target the subset of technologies that let them do what they want to do in the easiest way possible while targeting the largest userbase. I assume this isn't going to change the playing field in a significant way.

Usually a good incentive for devs is a higher cut of the sales. But I’m not sure how much Chinese users usually contribute to a dev’s revenue stream compared to US or EU users for example.

I remember reading a while ago that iOS is an attractive OS to target because the users tend to spend more in apps than the average Android users. If the average Chinese users spend even less it may be a disincentive. Not sure if this is still the case.

Anything that weens users from Google is arguably a good thing. But still, Huawei is likely tight with the Party, and that is arguably a risk. Or at least, it's a risk for Chinese dissidents, and for anyone with access to technology of interest. But for your random foreigner, probably not so much.

Amazon tried this, developers just made google based apps. So much of the compatibility libraries are tied in with google service it was impossible. Also even with Huawei size, it's easier just to write it in Google and ignore everyone else.

This is written as though Amazon somehow failed, which I don't believe is the case at all! You can run plenty of apps on the Fire tablets.

And there are also plenty that don't run.

It only takes one critical app not working for the customer to think their tablet must be 'broken' because their friend can run the app and they can't.

The Fire tablet line seems to be doing just fine anyway.

> Now app developers have a big incentive to avoid Google Play Services and run on open-source Android.

Only for applications targeting Chinese users in China, behind the GFW, which is a special kind of a market abet a large one. If a developer is not targeting that market, not using Google services is using a spoon to dig a trench.

The article mentions they already have their own Huawei App Store and developer resources. I’m sure it’s still in the early stages but this could hurt Google in the long run if Chinese manufacturers are excluded even temporarily.

> He added that the firm had set aside $1bn (£801m) to encourage developers to make their apps compatible, and said more than 45,000 apps had already integrated the firm's technology. But he did not name any of them.

Which is a worry as I've a few Huwaai products - one of which they have yet to release a manual for and still a work in progress by their own admission on a product that has been out for nearly half a year and known about for a year from initial trade airing. Let alone bugs, design flaws and general case of great hardware, just as always let down by software oversights. Heck a full blown router today and you can't change the DNS due to some bug, this is 2019, and I've got old routers 15 years old that did more, better. Talking about the Huawei AI Cube 4G router here btw - nice kit, just needs some love on the software and...a manual.

The biggest opportunity I see here is if they can push a youtube alternative. It's the perfect moment with the ongoing controversies and the upcoming election. With a couple of billion they can pull most of the youtube stars on the condition they simply air some ads for the company. And if they manage to get some talent in a few years they can take a stand against western advertisers.

So burn money on a bunch of people to make videos for Huavei made youtube knock off. Good luck with that.

F-Droid is kinda a ... less friendly store though.

To me it feels like a store for developers. When looking for even something simple like a qr code scanner I ran into a lot of one off developer type apps that require specific hardware and other apps or programs installed to even function. I found even the explanations hard to describe.

What you're seeing is the low budget of ethical community-based FLO software rather than an actual bias toward developers in the design.

That makes sense, it's just as far as exposing a mass audience... I probably wouldn't.

I doubt a manufacturer like Huawei is willing to lock themselves into F-Droid's level of FLOSS requirements.

I doubt F-Droid has the resources to deal with millions of Huawei users.

They already have their own store called app gallery

A phone without Google or Apple? I'm no fan of Huawei but credit where credit is due.

I'm still waiting for a reasonable phone that will allow me to install my own OS and, more importantly, dump the OS and go with something else when it annoys me.

Yeah, because a phone imaged by an entity controlled by the CCP is better than a phone without Google or Apple.

I'm no supporter of either Apple or Goog, but applauding a mass spyware device from the CCP would be satire a couple years ago.

It's not like they have a track record of subverting phones for targeted genocide or anything[1]

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/09/massive_iphon...

Do you have any evidence of that?

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/31/china-google-iphone-uyghur...

https://www.volexity.com/blog/2019/09/02/digital-crackdown-l...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/27/the-world-know...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/09/06/apple-h...

So, no, then? There's nothing in any of these links to support the claim that there is "CCP spyware" on the phones.

In fact at least two of your articles are about them putting spyware on iPhones, which undercuts your point further.

So does any of that have to do with Huawei? Or is it just an OS that Huawei happens to use was included in an indiscriminate attack?

I remember talks here on HN about Chinese made IOT devices phoning home to servers in China. There have also been discussion on HN about Huawei's telecom equipment being backdoored or simply rigged to siphon information back to china.

If this were the case, why do the vast majority of mobile phone networks around the world continue to use and even buy more from Huawei?

Naiveté and a bit of corruption and/or blackmail. More people need to watch this recent interview with a former CCP insider on the Chinese threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cwXifDaCjE&t=3s.

Lots of people talking about Huawei backdoors, none providing credible evidence of them actually existing. They have their share of security vulnerabilities but no worse than competitors such as Cisco[1].

Random Chinese made IOT devices phoning home to servers in China is definitely a thing, but has nothing to do with Huawei.

[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/evidence-of-backdoors-i...

What kind of data is being sent?

Devices that need to legitimately phone home for something tend to do so by requesting servers within or close to the country they were developed in.

Imagine people getting riled up at the thought of Apple phoning home to a US-based NTP server..

I also feel amused that huawei smart phone are quite popular, and you are only able to find claims from mainstream media outlets instead of users with Huawei phone, which have been proven to lack the ability to verify tech details...

> which have been proven to lack the ability to verify tech details

Sorry are you saying that Huawei users are thick or something?

(If you have evidence of Huawei phones having software preinstalled that uploads a user's whatsapp conversations and whatnot to some IP then be my guest! But I don't think you do...)

Dude the US spied on the undersea fiber to steal contract from companies in my (democratic) country.

Say what you want about the chinese, but they're not the only ones playing that game.

> but they're not the only ones playing that game.

The original comment is literally comparing Huawei favouably to US counterparts, though

Not related? Tapping an undersea cable doesn't compromise encrypted traffic.

Unless it looks like the NSA gets Apple and Google to put in back-doors, the products are still significantly safer than Huawei which is just an arm of the government.

All phones are mass spyware devices. Do you want someone who has control over your life, the ability to imprison you, or physically come to your house to know everything about you...

Or someone who is kept completely away from you by those sworn to protect you?

Google and Apple and etc are controlled by the American government. The one who can actually do something to you.

The CCP can't do anything to me. Try getting to me. The USA has power over me. The CCP has zero power in my life.

So yes, I would prefer my spyware to be sending my info to someone with zero capability to put it to use.

"Yeah, because a phone imaged by an entity controlled by the CCP is better than a phone without Google or Apple."

A phone without all of them would be the best deal but, as an European, I'm 100% sure that assuming all three of them are spying on people using their phones, currently the Chinese are the least likely to give any data about me to my government.

Huawei phone's bootloader can't be unlocked since last year, so you'll have to look elsewhere.

Yes, since mid-2018, Huawei has not provided a public method for anyone to unlock the bootloader of any Huawei phone.

https://www.xda-developers.com/xda-huawei-decision-stop-boot...

If you can't unlock the bootloader, that means you can't change the OS or root the phone.

This upset developers, especially since Huawei pays XDA Developers to promote their sub-brand (Honor) with sponsored content. It's ironic to see Huawei ads plastered all over XDA when Huawei phones are not developer-friendly at all.

xda the website is just like any other website that will take ad money. The developers are independent and do their own thing. xda is one of those relics of the past that just has a large number of users. So you get visibility and QA for free. Other than that, replacing a forum like xda that is not ad run should not be that difficult if it weren't for the inertia.

Sure, I will give my trust to the Chinese communist government over Google or Apple. One is prying for my money and the other is to suppress democracy.

Why I was keen on the wileyfox Swift when it came out - cynogen as standard, lots of nice features, just alas cynogen ceased/transitioned and the swift2 went AOSP and that's nearly 3 years old phone wise.

So people try, just that the core consumer market don't care/or aware of what such choices actualy mean for them still - hence, many do fail.

But some nice more open phones comming and getting better on prices. Until then, a good old supported phone for alternative OS that you can root and the likes of old samsungs, moto and pixel phones just seem to be the safer bets.

But doable today, just effort above what you would really want to be doing still.

Sony has some phones in their developer program that can be unlocked officially. The small SW vendor Jolla supports that to install their SailfishOS.

It's a reasonable phone for me, but I don't have especially high requirements.

From their most recent update, it sounds like Pine64 is getting close to this:

https://www.pine64.org/2019/09/05/september-update-the-pinep...

It's definitely a device for tinkerers and open source enthusiasts, but the price and the number of different projects supporting it is pretty exciting.

Some more technical details on the project:

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don't_be_evil

>"It forced us to use the HMS [Huawei Mobile Services] core."

This is the major failure I see here. Basically, no one wants Huawei's blobby bloatware with system level privileges any more than Google's blobby bloatware with system level privileges. If the world thinks that you are a Chinese spying company, you do not combat that by shipping more crap. They had a good opportunity to either extend AOSP or to make HMS open source. Instead, they imitate Google poorly.

There’s plenty of people of simply don’t care about that, they just want a cheap and pretty phone.

Significantly extending AOSP is hard. As soon as you make architectural changes, you've effectively made a fork, and it'll be a massive amount of work to merge future versions of AOSP and your fork.

Unless you want to put as many engineering dollars into it as Google does, you'd be better off to keep near vanilla AOSP, and build stuff on top as APK's.

Quite impressive hardware. The fact that 5G is integrated in the SoC is a first, display looks great too.

I’m sure you can still use apps like YouTube and Gmail via the phones browser, that’s what I do on my iPhone.

Yeah bought a Huawei tablet & thought same. Good bang per buck on hardware even with questionable associations.

After seeing the iPhone11 Pro, Pixel 4, and the Mate 30 Pro I have to say that the Mate 30 implemented the 3 camera the best. Its less of an eyesore being in the center of the device instead of the top left corner.

Also, the bezel around it makes it look like a device that's a phone and a camera instead of "hiding the fact" that its a phone that happens to have photo capabilities. I really like the design.

Too bad for the lack of Android/Google apps, for I would have considered getting one.

>Its less of an eyesore being in the center of the device instead of the top left corner.

I genuinely have no idea what the back of my phone looks like. All I'm concerned with is the quality of the photos it takes.

That's what I thought too but with the advent of ultra-wide angle lenses on more and more phones, I definitely noticing more spoiled pictures if I use a volume button as shutter on phones with corner lenses than phones with center lenses.

I somewhat agree. Yes, the back isn't that noticeable when actually using it. But its noticeable now. Even to the point where people I know who loves their iPhones say that its "ugly".

Apple is not known to make "ugly" devices. Their devices are practical and engineered thoughtfully.

Having the camera in the top left corner as opposed to the center seems like a mistake to me. Especially since they are promoting the camera to be a significant upgrade. Put it front and center!

Apple's history on device (at least with Jobs) always was have a fully functional revolutionary machine that was easy to use and beautiful inside and out. They've been that way since the Macintosh. The look was much user-friendly and approachable. They even signed the inside of the box as if they are presenting a piece of art. Even the font-face they introduced was to promote artistry in the technical world.

My point is, the iPhone 11 is an amazing device, but the look of their biggest new feature, the cameras, does not fit well with their history of artistic prowess. Steve Jobs would have never OKed this design placement.

Now all this means is the user needs to install themselves rather than use the pre-install bloatware. A clean start might actually be preferrable for a lot of people

I find it hilarious when reading news like these to remember that the official stance of US government is that their national security is endangered if that phone ships with Google Play.

EDIT: It actually is national security (https://www.google.fi/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/tru...)

I am not an expert, but I doubt that this is an accurate characterisation of the reasons for the ban. Isn’t this more about intellectual property issues and economic disagreements?

I think it is mostly political. When one uses Google Maps, he tells USA's 3-letter-agencies when they are. If Huawei replaces Google Maps with "Huawei Maps" then USA stops getting that info, and China gets that info. Now apply the same for emails, text messages, etc.

I believe that even "innocuous" games (started playing AFKArena lately) collect the IP address of my phone and tell the lovely Chinese gov who I am, where I am, etc. (AFKArena policies have the word Tencent a lot in them).

You imply security agencies have direct uncontrolled online access to Google maps personal data today, this is not true. There is due process to access private data and you can always have the option to enable, disable, delete it. Lets stick to the facts.

You imply that they don't. If the Wikileaks/Snowden story, the AT&T (room 641A) story taught us anything is that we cannot place any reliance to any due process and that 3-letter agencies harvest anything they can, any way they can, without any respect to privacy (big laughter here) and due process.

I am not trashing security agencies. I am merely stating that lines in the sand never seem to stopped them before and most likely won't stop them now (or in the future).

Whether it could be the AT&T case, or a bribed sys/net admin, "they" want it all and they got the budgets to get it done.

I’m under the impression that the entity list is for national security issues. Also there are direct quotes stating it is so (https://www.google.fi/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/tru...)

Sure in practical terms it is not used as such. This time it’s just ammunition for trade war. But taking it at it’s face value is more amusing.

But Trump is willing to OK Huawei if China agrees to the US's demands. Weird isn't it, that it's not a massive problem if China agrees the the US's economic demands, that suddenly Huawei isn't a national security threat. Almost as if Huawei is not a national security threat and in the first place and it's all been made up to help Trump bully another China...

> firm had set aside $1bn (£801m) to encourage developers to make their apps compatible

It also launched without Google Services. This could be great push towards completely open sourced Android platform.

Reminds me of a time MS was paying hundreds to thousands of dollars for garbage calculator/flashlight Windows Phone apps.

Well I think that makes the phone more attractive. Something that doesn't report everything I do to Google.

Huawei should market the shit out of that.

Blackphone (maybe used to) sell a hardened version of the Android phone without the google spyware but version 2 was really expensive and made in small quantities.

This Mate30 will be mass-produced. They could make this the favorite privacy phone. (Well privacy from the US surveillance state)

Yeah instead you get a device that reports everything to the Chinese surveillance state which is much worse.

Excellent specs and cheap compared to the competition.

I am sure some enterprising folks on XDA will come up with a nifty easy utility to "googlyfi" your new Huawei phone.

Also won't surprise me if some phone shops will take the initiative and do it out of the box before selling it to you.

As long as Huawei continues to ship phones with locked bootloaders that can't be unlocked, that is simply not going to happen.

https://www.xda-developers.com/xda-huawei-decision-stop-boot...

https://www.xda-developers.com/huawei-mate-30-google-play-st...

You won't be able to root Huawei phones, much less customize the stock OS to any meaningful extent. You also won't be able to change the OS (to something like LineageOS).

I guess that's a feature..plus the iPhone camera seems a joke in comparison with mate pro.

Ditto for the Galaxy Note 10

Did Huawei not see what happened with the Amazon Fire Phone or Windows Phone? If you launch a phone with an anemic ecosystem, it will fail.

They are pressured to do this, if the US wasn't so dickish about it they would just release a certified Android.

They are probably expecting users to download Gapps themselves. They don't have any other choice here; it's launch without them or don't launch at all.

Except Huawei has quite a bit of Asia for themselves.

Except Huawei is already the second largest phone manufacturer in the world.

And phones in China already ship without the Play Store.

it’s not anemic in China though

China has its own harmonized app stores, the issue will be how the phone will work without he G-stack for non Chinese markets.

Will it have a locked bootloader?

Previous Huawei phones have all had a fairly robustly locked bootloader. Now it seems there is quite some incentive for them to make the bootloader unlockable to make inserting GMSCore easier...

One could imagine an underground network of US based people reflashing these phones to have Google services.

You don't need an unlockable bootloader for that. They ship stub packages that can be updated later by the user [1].

[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/huawei-mate-30-google-play-st...

https://twitter.com/cybnox/status/1174722533377085444

This is probably a key conversation. In other words, we don't really know yet what part of GMS dependent apps will or will not work.

It´s going to kill overseas sales for them. Both me and my gf have Huawei phones, but the next phone will be a Xiaomi.

Fortunately the U.S. didn't kill all Chinese manufacturers, Samsung and the rest are overpriced compared to them.

This is quite interesting. I assume there are 3rd party alternatives for most of the essential Google apps which lets you access the google service like Gmail or YouTube

You can access GMail or YouTube from your browser. I don’t install the apps on my phone.

The worse soy on our Android phones is Google Play Services. For some magical reason when I firewall the Google Play Services I stop receiving ANY notifications (Signal, emails etc.). For some reason all these are routed through Google. I wonder how much of a coincidence/mishap is that in the architecture.

Does anyone know why, if I can bypass it?

Play Services does handles all push notifications. The 'some reason' is battery life, because your phone shouldn't maintain 30 long lived connections.

From the privacy aspect, I believe all notifications are end to end encrypted actually. Same as Apple.

Sure, but there's no way to unbundle the very useful notifications service with... everything else. It's not the notifications service that's the problem, it's everything else you're required to run if you want it.

For this you may use microG. I have it installed for geolocation using Wi-Fi and cellular antennas but never tried to enable the notification service.

I would actually be interested in being able to choose the server used for this service, and would enable it without hesitation if I could use my own server for instance.

Encrypted, but that's on transit. Does Google read everything, or the only thing transfered is the alert and NOT the Signal/text/WhatsApp message itself?

Signal is e2ee so Google Cloud Messaging should only get the alert itself, then the encrypted message is downloaded from the server and decoded on device.

End to end encrypted to device, standard pub/private key crypto.

That's intentional, push notifications are part of Google Play framework, not AOSP Android.

The reason is, that you won't get battery savings if random app can keep your radio busy. Since mobile carriers managed to kill WAP-Push some 15+ years ago, the only way to get push notifcations is to have a long-lived TCP connection open.

However, that opens another can of worms, there are multitude of timeouts on the way between your phone (including your phone) and the push messages server. Most apps would get this wrong, and they would have to cooperate together anyway (radio is global resource on your phone, it won't switch to low power if another app is busy chatting).

So on Android phones that come with Google apps, the task of managing push notifications is handled by Google Play framework (and also whatever Amazon is using), by single long-lived connection, used for all push messages, and not by apps themselves.

Exactly.

Anybody remember the way Blackberry handled this before proper push messaging? The data connection was completely dead, they just got the mobile companies themselves to do it over the phone call connection (SMS?) to indicate when there was something to read at which point the data layer came up. Really efficient in those days, except you obviously paid a fee for 'Blackberry service'

Push notifications require an intermediary server between the app service provider and the device push provider, that's GCM.

Your phone has a persistent connection to it so that the GCM can "notify" your device when you receive a push.

The alternative is to have a custom Android OS linked to your own push provider and then convincing app server developers to send pushes to that instead.

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, it's hard to get away from.

Those apps are using "Google Play Services" for their notifications. For example, you can see it mentioned at https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360027913252-Tr...

Well you got [invidous](invido.us) as an alternative web frontend as well as [NewPipe](https://f-droid.org/app/org.schabi.newpipe) for Android

First link is just endless spam redirects for me. Correct link is https://invidio.us

yeah, looks like they omitted the third "i" in "invidio".

27 w wireless charging!

I assume this is going to generate excessive heat. My understanding is that batteries age poorly from heat stress. So, I am curious what routine 27w wireless charging is going to do for battery life.

I was just looking and could not find anything concrete but did see it was expected to use a non-removable battery. That is not a huge problem as long as they designed it to be fairly easily changed and if that is the case then I would gladly trade battery life for fast charging. I guess time will tell on this one but good question.

Wasn't high capacity wireless charging the project Apple gave up on just a year ago? (Apple AirPower)

None the less; this seems like a very impressive piece of hardware.

Why are the Facebook apps not blocked by the blacklist?

For some this will be bad news, but for others - this they will view as good news. So mixed blessings, though for you common core users - they will see this as bad.

However - eventually services and the phone will be separate and eventually end up with phones like we did with the browser selection option thrust upon you giving you the choice, even if you choose to go with what you had originally.

Fun times ahead and in the end, I feel that the consumer will get a better deal in the end and as geeks who love to hack away at our phones - may get an easier life.

i'm no expert but it's a check list of where google can be found:

1.Your phone Operating system 2. gallery manager. 3. E-mail. 4. Google music player. 5. google video player. 6. Youtube app.

there's more but your time is precious and maybe you allready know all these but don't care.

let's imagine your phone was a person.. he had like gazillion types of cancer. from birth.

Video of our team's analysis on this subject: https://youtu.be/3bl4pXd2Sqc

Might be a good idea to mention what is your team.

Applico and they don't seem to understand how the Chinese phone market works.

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