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This made me think about the Huawei devices that ship without Google Play Services. But, looking at the list of supported devices, I could not see any new Huawei phones. I wonder what the reason for this lack of support could be... Is it because of locked bootloaders?

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Yup it's precisely because Huawei stopped providing bootloader unlock. Before that, Huawei was on a good track to be appreciated by developers. They had developers program (giving away devices), great GSI support (which means easier to make device specific ROM as well), Xiaomi's bang-per-buck. There's still a bit of development around devices of that era, but now it's pretty much dead, even though there are some ways to unlock some not-too-new devices through DC Unlocker for instance.

Older Huawei were pretty normal and you could request unlock code, etc. I think they started to get more secretive/closed as every random fact about their implementations could be made news worthy by adding a suggestion of incompetence, pirating or snooping purpose.

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