Google may be subject to the US restrictions currently placed on Huawei, but the two companies appear to have engineered a workaround. As it stands, all new devices that Huawei releases cannot be certified for use with Google Services, the impact of which is that handsets like the Mate 30 series cannot come with the Google Play Store, Gmail or Google Pay pre-installed. While it has always been possible to side-load these apps along with Google Services onto unsupported devices, Google Service would flag that these devices are not Google certified and apps like Google Pay or even some third-party apps would not run. Incidentally, beta builds can suffer from the same issue too if OEMs do not certify them with Google.
This is Google Pay working on the #Mate30Pro. pic.twitter.com/sb0hvPzUdn
— Damien Wilde (@iamdamienwilde) September 24, 2019
How is this possible?
It seems that Huawei has installed small mini versions, or stubs, of Google apps and onto the Mate 30 series that will give full access to Google Services once updated. Accordingly, SafetyNet, an algorithm that recognises whether a device is Google certified, recognises all Mate 30 series devices and allows them to run apps like Google Pay. According to XDA Developers Editor in Chief Mishaal Rahman, Google appears to have whitelisted the Mate 30 series; we would have thought the opposite should have been true considering the ongoing issues that Huawei has with the current US administration.
To test, I compared SafetyNet status on:
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) September 24, 2019
1) Stock Pixel 2 XL fingerprint
2) Stock Mate 30 Pro fingerprint
3) Mate 30 Pro fingerprint with added typos
1 & 2 pass, but 3 fails. Ergo, SafetyNet recognizes the Mate 30 Pro when IIRC it shouldn't. Google just whitelisted it anyway. pic.twitter.com/2TimcUeS1U
Installing Google apps & services on the Mate 30 Pro
If you own or are considering buying a Mate 30 series handset, and you want to know how to install Google apps, then 9to5google has published a how-to for doing so. We have summarised the article below too, though:
- Head to Izplay.net using the pre-installed browser and install the "Google Services Framework Installer"
- After installing that file, then open the Google Play Store and check whether you can log into your Google account. If not, then restart your device and try again
- A restart should fix most issues, and you should be able to log into your Google account to use Google services
- The Google Play Store will give you access to all key Google apps including Gmail, Google Pay, Google Maps and YouTube to name but a few. There have been reports of the latter failing to launch the first time that they are opened, but a restart should fix this.
So, it seems that Google and Huawei have either found a clever loophole to allow the Mate 30 series to access Google apps and services, or they are colluding to circumvent the ban being enforced by the current US administration. Regardless, for consumers it means that they need not resort to rooting their Mate 30 series handset to use Google apps and services, which is handy. This may only be a temporary workaround though, and we cannot guarantee that this method will always work.
Source(s)
@Iamdamienwilde via 9to5google & @MishaalRahman (1) (2)