Google Mobile Services (GMS) alternative is hard to find, says Huawei Vice President

After the US trade ban, Huawei is prohibited to do business with the US companies and services provided by Google have remained hard to replace for Huawei, said the company’s senior executive.

In an interview with FinancialTimes, Joy Tan, vice-president of public affairs at Huawei, Huawei has been able to find an alternative for much of the equipment they buy from the US but there’s no such alternative found to replace Google’s services.

“After the entity list, we were able to figure out some of the alternative solutions. The most challenging part is Google-managed services. We can continue to use the Android platform since it is open-source, but we cannot use the services that help apps run on it.” said Tan.

If Android is an open-source why Huawei cannot access Google services? Simply because the so-called Google Mobile Services (GMS) is not the part Android Open source project.

Under the allegation of the security threat from Huawei’s equipment, the US imposed a trade ban on the company. As the allegations made by the US are repeatedly denied by the Chinese tech giant.

After the US ban, the existing Huawei device on Android can access Google services but the new ones cannot grab GMS licenses. For example, Huawei Mate 30 series is the first Huawei smartphone launched with open-source Android 10 and Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) instead of GMS.

Huawei believes that the new it’ll take some time to develop its own ecosystem.

“Yes. We have to find alternative solutions for that ecosystem, but it’s going to take some time to build,” she said.

To develop its own ecosystem, Huawei has announced a $1 billion investment to support developers around the globe and collaborating with local developers to publish their apps directly on Huawei App gallery integrating the HMS SDK.

Besides, the latest development in the US-China trade talks has brought some hope for the company as US has reportedly approving licenses for companies that want to its goods to Huawei and Google could be one of those companies to resume supplies to the Chinese tech giant.