If you live in the US, you know that you can’t simply walk into a US carrier-operated store and buy a Huawei phone. However, you can find the international variant of some of the company’s devices on Amazon and eBay, including the 2022 flagship photography-based P50 Pro. Recently, however, Huawei made an announcement that concerns those who regularly purchase the company’s innovative and well-made phones for global markets.
The announcement stated that the upcoming version of Huawei’s Harmony operating system, called HarmonyOS Next, would completely lose the ability to support any Android apps. However, the Chinese manufacturer clarified its comment by noting that none of its phones sold outside of China will use HarmonyOS Next. Instead, these phones will use the EMUI operating system, based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) version of Android, but without Google’s services and apps.
Huawei is not allowed to offer the Google version of Android for a few reasons. The Chinese government forbids the use of some Google apps in the country, and Huawei’s placement on the US entities list as a threat to national security means it cannot work with Google at all. But Huawei phones outside of China will run on EMUI, allowing users to sideload Android apps onto their Huawei phones.
The Huawei P60 Pro
According to a translated version of CNMO, “Huawei will continue to increase its support for developers worldwide.” Wccftech says that Huawei has a large number of developers ensuring that all their apps work seamlessly on phones without Google’s services. Unfortunately, Huawei has no plans to develop an international version of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro series for sale outside of China.
It is expected that the next flagship line from Huawei will be the photography-based P70 series, which will also be powered by Huawei’s own 7nm Kirin 9000s 5G chipset. It is not known if Huawei will offer this line for sale outside of China. The P70 series is expected to be announced in the first quarter of next year. If Huawei offers an international version of the P70 line, these units are expected to come pre-installed with EMUI, allowing owners to load Android apps that will run natively on these devices.