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You can no longer sideload Google apps on Huawei Mate 30 series – Explained
Unveiled on September 19, Huawei Mate 30 series is the first Huawei flagship lineup that doesn’t come with Google’s official set of applications but a third-party solution called – lZPlay came in light to sideload these missing Google apps and service but now there’s a major development going on this story.
John Wu, one of Android’s leading security researchers and the creator of Magisk came up with his research about the anatomy of lZPlay app and how it’s able to sideload Google apps on Huawei smartphones.
Wu said the lZPlay app uses some special Android administrative permissions limited to Huawei smartphones. Although, two of the permissions are not documented on the official developers portal of Huawei and these two are mainly responsible to install Google Services and Play Store on Huawei smartphones.
Wu claims that such permissions are not available for General Developers and to acquire these permissions, the developer must need to submit its code to Huawei and the final call on the permission use can only be made by Huawei after a process of deep inspection.
On the other hand, Android Central reached the company and confirmed that the company has nothing to do with lZPlay application.
Following Wu’s operation crackdown, lZPlay.net website is down and its app is no longer functional as it was before. Another new thing noticed by Alex Dobie from Android Central that the Mate 30 Pro that has the Google apps installed is no longer pass SafetyNet tests.
Soooo uhh this is new.
Since today’s developments, Mate 30 Pro now fails SafetyNet. Last week it passed.
What the what pic.twitter.com/fPeaWUHD2v
— Alex Dobie (@alexdobie) October 1, 2019
SafetyNet is Google’s set of services and APIs that help protect your app against security threats, including device tampering, bad URLs, potentially harmful apps, and fake users.
Simply put, the lZPlay permissions pierces the SafetyNet of Mate 30 to install Google apps directly on the system image using the high level permissions (mentioned above).
Also noted by Damien Wilde from 9to5Google, Google Pay is no longer works on Mate 30 Pro, which was successful working.
So as per @alexdobie original tweet. Failed CTS check = no more Google Pay working. So I tested.
But considering this was working less than 2 days ago, this is not good. pic.twitter.com/0E8pGNtY97
— Damien Wilde (@iamdamienwilde) October 1, 2019
For now, Huawei Mate 30 series is not out for the global consumers and it’s only available in China, where it doesn’t require the GMS license.
So, global users (very few) who’ve purchased the Chinese variants of Mate 30 series and already installed Google apps using the lZPlay (scrapped Safetynet framework) needs to wait until Huawei starts to roll out the devices outside of China or provides an official solution install Google services or something similar that could help on this matter.