Huawei Mate 30 series to launch in Europe next month without Gapps

Huawei unveiled the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro in Germany back in September, but never disclosed a launch date for the devices in Europe. Now there are reports saying that date is not far away.

Huawei seems to be gearing up to launch the Mate 30 and Mate 30 pro in Europe starting Mid-November, possibly on November 15th, according to Tech Garage citing sources based in China.

A complete list of which countries the Mate 30 and Mate 30 pro will first come to is still unknown but the report suspect they could be Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and Switzerland, which were normally involved in the first wave of Huawei launches.

(Photo: Huawei website)

Both the Mate 30 and the Mate 30 Pro have the Kirin 990 5G chipset, which is clocked at 2.86 GHz. The SoC is slightly different from the basic Kirin 990, running in the non-5G variants of the phones.

It has slightly faster CPU clusters and two big NPU cores to match the faster performance of the chipset, given the higher bandwidth speeds.

Both the devices have a total of 21 antennas each where 14 are for 5G, more than double the 6-antenna design of other 5G phones.

These two phones are available in standard colors for the Mate 30 series, Space Silver and Emerald Green. In addition to those, the Vegan Leather Orange and Vegan Leather Forest Green options are also available.

The Mate 30 is now available for pre-order in China for for 4,999 yuan ($705), while the Mate 30 Pro 5G costs 6,899 yuan ($975).

(Photo: Huawei website)

The phones will run the Android 10-based EMUI 10 but will not be able to use Google apps in an official way because of the U.S. ban. However, there is already some alternative methods that allow having Gapps.

At first there is a workaround called the LZPlay, an easy-to-use app enabling the installation of Google apps and services on the Mate 30 devices.

This was big news because a US blacklisting prohibits Huawei from using American components and software. The process allowed the Mate 30 Pro (along with the basic Mate 30) to run popular apps like Google Maps and Gmail that otherwise would not be permitted.

But only two days after the workarounds were found, they were taken away.

Good news is developers soon found a new way and posted it on XDA Developers forum that can again get Google apps running on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

While this method is not as simple as installing Google Services Assistant and letting it do everything, it still works — with the caveat that SafetyNet will continue to fail since that is a server-side change from Google.

According to a previous cnTechPost report, the steps are as follows:

1. Users need to back up their files to HiSuite on a PC and factory reset their phones.
2. Install the Google apps provided in the downloadable zip in the thread.
3. Unzip the provided backup image zip to your HiSuite backup folder on the PC.
4. Restore the backup to your device, ensuring that you also restore the “system settings” from the backup image to your phone.
5. Once the provided backup has been “restored” (aka installed) on your phone, you need to restart your device.
6. Next, ensure that you get into App Settings and clear all data for the Google apps that you installed, and grant all the permissions that those apps request.
7. Reboot for good measure.
8. Launch the Google Play Store while having an active internet connection on your phone.

The developer said the thread is not immediately clear on when you can restore your previous data. Most users will be using the method on new Huawei Mate 30 devices, so data loss should not be significant.