What does it feel like to use a Huawei phone without Google apps?

We all knew Huawei has lost access to the Google Mobile Services (GMS), which means new Huawei phones cannot run Google’s apps or services, or third party apps that use Google’s APIs.

This didn’t matter at all in Huawei’s home market in China. But in overseas markets, including Europe, where Huawei handsets are extremely popular, banned from Google apps means a lot.

But what exactly does it feel like to use a Huawei phone without Google apps? Android Police author Myriam Joire explained in a recent story.

Joire received a Chinese-market Honor 9x Pro review unit from the PR team, and so began his first serious experience using an Android phone without GMS.

Below are some pickups by cnTechPost, and you can read Joire’s full story here.

Unavailable services

Huawei’s built-in AppGallery mostly features Chinese apps so Joire tried to download and install the Amazon App Store APK.

This did not end well. While I was able to run the app and successfully login to my Amazon account, I systematically got a network error beyond this point, whether I was connected via LTE or WiFi — as if the phone was blocking access to Amazon’s servers.

Joire is not a big fan of the default Huawei/Honor launcher, so he installed Nova launcher. But when he tried making it the default launcher, the phone doesn’t allow him to change it.

Apparently, there are clones of the stock launcher with malware out there, so the company’s locked it down. Major bummer.

Joire enjoys using Google Chrome but can’t connect it to a Google account to sync bookmarks and browsing history. However, it works and even supports form and password autocompletion.

Google Drive and the company’s Documents, Sheets, and Slides apps installed fine but didn’t run.

Google Photos installs OK but crashes at launch.

It’s really unfortunate since it does so much more than just backup photos. At least Snapseed works without any issues.

Lyft and Uber both use the Google Maps APIs. The apps installed OK, but didn’t run without Google Play Services, just like Netflix. That makes them effectively useless.

Google Messages, Google Play Music and Google Drive didn’t work.

Available services

The Aurora Store is an unofficial Play Store client that gives any Android device anonymous access to every app in Google’s store. Joire found that It’s totally awesome, and highly recommend it.

Google’s Gboard was able to install and run without any issues. This was a pretty rare instance of complete success with a Google app, though, because many of the others rely on a linked account for certain features to work.

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram installed and ran normally.

Google Maps works without any issues. Like with Chrome, you can’t connect the app to a Google account to sync search and location history, but that’s not a huge deal.

Workaround

Despite the original OS doesn’t support GMS, but there probably workarounds.

At first, there is LZPlay, an easy-to-use app enabling the installation of Google apps and services on the Mate 30 devices. But soon it disappeared.

However, last month developers posted a new method that can get Google apps running on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

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.

Joire noted he was aware of at least two workarounds to restore GMS support on his handsets, but that’s besides the point.

First, this isn’t as trivial as downloading and installing a few APKs and second, I’d like to explore what’s possible and what’s not before having to reach for the nuclear option — enabling GMS support.

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