Huawei’s Google app loophole: Just keep re-releasing old devices

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  The Huawei P30 Lite, now with a new hat (and more RAM). [credit: Huawei ]

Huawei is still struggling to cope with the Trump administration's US export ban, which blocks US companies from doing business with the Chinese company. While Huawei can be pretty independent as far as hardware goes, the loss of Google's software is basically going to kill Huawei's phone business outside of China. The company is already expecting a 20-percent drop in phone sales in 2020, and thanks to the yearly lifecycle of smartphones, a lot of Google/Huawei phones are still on the market, so we're seeing only the beginning of the effects of the export ban.

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View more storiesHuawei is doing its best to delay the effects of the export ban, though, and lately, it seems to have come up with a new loophole to keep shipping the Google apps: re-release old smartphones. The way the export ban has worked in practice is that Huawei devices that launched before the export ban (and some that launched even slightly after) can still be sold with Google apps. Devices that launched well after the ban, like the Mate 30 Pro, are stuck without the Google apps. So Huawei's solution, and its interpretation of the law, is that re-releases of old devices can still ship with Google apps.

So meet the "New Editions" of old Huawei phones. This week, the company announced that the Huawei P30 Pro would be returning as the "Huawei P30 Pro New Edition," and earlier this year it re-launched the P30 Lite as the "P30 Lite New Edition." Both of these phones are from March 2019, so they're well over a year old now, but they both have Google app licenses, so welcome back!

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