Big news over the weekend. Following The United States government’s ban on importing products from Huawei, Google had to suspend Huawei’s Android license.
Alphabet’s Google has suspended business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware, software and technical services except those publicly available via open source licensing, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday, in a blow to the Chinese technology company that the U.S. government has sought to blacklist around the world.
Holders of current Huawei smartphones with Google apps, however, will continue to be able to use and download app updates provided by Google, a Google spokesperson said, confirming earlier reporting by Reuters.
This means that from now on, Huawei only has access to the AOSP parts of Android – it no longer has access to the Google Play Store and other Google Play Services. This is a major blow to Huawei’s business in the United States. Other companies, like Intel and Qualcomm, have also complied with the US government’s ban and are also blacklisiting Huawei.
Huawei’s response doesn’t say much:
Huawei has made substantial contributions to the development and growth of Android around the world. As one of Android’s key global partners, we have worked closely with their open-source platform to develop an ecosystem that has benefitted both users and the industry.
Huawei will continue to provide security updates and after-sales services to all existing Huawei and Honor smartphone and tablet products, covering those that have been sold and that are still in stock globally.
It’s important to note that the US government has as of yet been unable to provide any evidence that Huawei devices contain backdoors or are somehow used to spy on people. That being said, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine such a scenario – all countries spy on all other countries, and China is in a unique position, as the manufacturing centre of the world, to do so.
I do wish to point out, though, that devices from other companies – Apple, Google, Dell, and virtually everyone else – are manufactured in the same factories by the same people led by the same managers owned by the same Chinese government as Huawei devices. Singling out Huawei, while trusting your Pixel 3 or iPhone X which rolls off the same assembly line, seems naive, at best.
China will, probably, retaliate, especially since Chinese people themselves seem to solidly back Huawei. The totalitarian government has many ways it can strike back, and with a growing sentiment in China to boycott Apple, it wouldn’t be surprising to see China target Apple, specifically, in its response.
Intel, Xilinx, Qualcomm, and Broadcom are also ending their relationships with Huawei. Have fun building hardware without CPUs or FPGAs or switch ASICs, shitty commies.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-19/google-to-end-some-huawei-business-ties-after-trump-crackdown
“Chipmakers including Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Xilinx Inc. and Broadcom Inc. have told their employees they will not supply Huawei until further notice, according to people familiar with their actions.”
Have fun buying anything ever without those “shitty commies”.
In place of the Chinese, I would turn to Linux and would do everything possible so that open OS becomes popular and in great demand on those phones that still use Android. It is necessary to ensure that Android applications can be installed on Linux phones. The success of Linux on servers and on desktops shows that this is a quite doable task. The most important thing is that the OS be completely open and built on the principles on which Linux is built.
….wut?
Linux isn’t going to save anything. Android is a Linux based OS already, so i fail to see how “linux” is going to solve the issues created by banning Google from providing the Play Store.
In fact, Google not providing the Play Store is the least of Huwawei’s issues. Russia has its own home-grown Play Store alternative called the Yandex Store (https://store.yandex.com/), so i expect they’ll be very little fallout from losing Google in the domestic chinese market. If anything, the Google Play Store ban will only hurt western countries.
Also, the biggest issue with the Huwawei ban is the fact that they buy a lot of components from US companies. The embargo is going to hurt the profit margins of US companies just as much as it’s going to hurt “commie” china.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/usa-stocks/us-stocks-wall-st-rises-as-tech-shares-rebound-after-huawei-reprieve-idUKL4N22X3YC
On top of that, pretty much every electronic device for sale in the last 20 years was manufactured in China. I think i’m going to invest in candles, because if this embargo goes any further, i’m going to have difficulty finding LED lightbulbs to light my house with.
Talk about self-inflicted injuries. Who do you imagine those companies _will_ be able to sell their products and services to? Huawei is currently the world’s number-3 mobile phone manufacturer, and barring some (OK, large) exceptions building in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, most of the rest are made in China, as Thom said. This will affect the profitability of many American companies, one assumes. Not being able to sell implies not getting paid.
tidux none of those companies in fact listed are required to build a smart phone or network hardware.
Allwinner and Rockchip gives you cpu and there are other options for FPGAs and other parts.
Have fun using hardware, software, clouths, electronics and plenty of other stuff that your companies so glady import from those commies.
If you check the specs for Huawei phones you will learn they manufacture themselves the CPUs and 5G modems
I am also not fan of western democracy especially if we have oil. I think the US has already banned China from using Intel chips to build its supercomputers, but it does not stop them from building one and more.
How is it any different than Huawei?
I feel like this isn’t really about hardware trust, it’s about shutting out Huawei and other Chinese companies as much as possible from future telecommunications standards as with 5G.
I suspect it’s about US bullying China in an attempt to get a “more favorable to US” trade deal later.
For some kinky optimism; I think it’d be funny if Huawei finds alternative parts and hardware suppliers, and replaces Google play services in all their phones with the alternatives they already have for the Chinese market. At least that way it’d be easier for people in other countries (e.g. in EU) to find a smartphone that isn’t infested with software from the world’s largest spammer (a company that has been fined for multiple violations of EU’s privacy laws).
I mean honestly; I have no reason to trust Huawei products (for all I know they may have backdoors), but I have even less reason to trust US products (they may have backdoors too).
My thoughts is what if Huawei actually succeeds in building an app store? There won’t be as many apps as on Google Play, but at the same time if it was better managed there would not be 95% crapware like on Google Play. Maps, especially with satellite images is a longer shot, though.
IF they were to succeed in this, which is probably not impossible, that could leave Google in a crappy position.
They already have an app store: https://huaweimobileservices.com/appgallery/ Do not forget, their phones sold in China didn’t had Play Store even before.
Yes, I knew. And this reenforces my suspicions that they might be able to pull it through. The question is if US trade restrictions will restrict US based app/game companies from selling through Huawei’s store. The answer is probably yes.
It’s probably highly unlikely any government would release such details, surely doing so would risk exposing their security methods. I know it seems unreasonable to the paranoid, but it’s also probably a reality of acting in the security space that you cannot always provide evidence.
In any case, with the Five Eyes agreement it may not be the USA’s evidence to divulge!
“Singling out Huawei, while trusting your Pixel 3 or iPhone X which rolls off the same assembly line, seems naive, at best.”
The difference is that with the other brands, those who implant spying capability into a phone have to do so while hiding it from the phone’s *designers*. That’s only one extra step beyond hiding it from “opposition” spy agencies, but it would require an extra level of care and expertise.
This still looks to me more about trade wars and pissing highest up a wall than anything else, though.
I didn’t think the primary issue was about the handsets at all, it’s primarily about backends on communications towers.
That is exactly where the center of the whole imbroglio is, for all I have read.
The major problem for the approach USA has picked is that, throughout history, there is an extensive list of cases it backfired, with the opposite side not only able to complete the end goals but also becoming a contender in the field of blockage, instead of just using whatever was needed to achieve the end results. Lets not be naive about it, China has all is needed to surpass this obstacle and become one more example of undesirable consequences of such strategy.
That’s assuming the intelligence doesn’t have evidence. If they have the evidence and simply aren’t sharing it publicly as to not tip of China to their methods and what they know, then everyone will shut out Huawei and then they can only sell their infrastructure products domestically.
Of course intelligence agencies have some facts and indications. Remember how good they were exposing the chemical and biological weapons programs in Iraq before the Gulf “War”*? The ones that didn’t exist?
(* the USA didn’t declare war before attacking a sovereign state, a similar act they still complain about (the Pearl Harbor attack). The the difference the US just doesn’t do it while the Japanese embassy were simply to slow to decode the declaration of war – while US decryption operations finished before the attack itself.)
State actors don’t expose what they find, they take it and utilize it for their own purposes, The USA’s own NASA Saturn V space program was founded on pirated enemy technologies. Wernher von Braun’s and Wehrmacht technology that magically disappeared(smuggled out of Austria and NE Germany) at the end of WWII to re-surface on US soil!
It’s naive to think they’d tell the general public, and it’s not some tinfoil conspiracy issue, it just makes sense that the how, where and why is kept secret. If the USA found back-doors and gateways in communications hardware that were used to spy on them, they could just as easily use the same for defense against foreign or home grown forces. Telling the world what you have got would be moronic!
The last time the US pulled this shit was with intel-CPUs for a chinese supercomputer.
The endresult was a chinese supercomputer with homegrown CPUs.
I expect the same this time.
As someone happily using a Huawei phone I can safely say I won’t mind it running AOSP instead of Android (hmmm… matbe even prefer it that way) IF, and this is a big if, I can still use the 3-rd party apps I do regularly use. That’s the key, I want my apps. Hopefully, the Trump ban won’t be extended to 3-rd party apps published in the Chinese app store Huawei will have to put as default. From the 1-st party apps, those made by Google, I would probably miss Maps the most, for the others there are either 3-rd party clients or replacements.
Curious to see if this rumored Hong Meng “custom OS” developed by Huawei as a backup is an Android fork or something completely new, not running the existing apps.
Now from Google’s point of view, the situation is unfortunate if their second largest distributor starts competing directly with them. But there are an upside: meaning there is a big competitor, they may escape some antitrust charges in the EU.
I’m not sure if downloading apps from a Chinese state-sanctioned provider (a.k.a. app store) is a good idea.
About the maps, try HERE maps and YANDEX maps as alternatives. Here is not fantastic about traffic details, but you can download the maps to your phone, for the whole country, and thus avoid wasting data. Yandex, in its turn, is not very good with addresses. It can lead you to wrong locations. (And yeah I know, I just bad-mouthed chinese, and am now recommending russkies, that’s not consistent).
This is a really interesting situation, and maybe one for the history books.
This is the first time (that I am aware of) that a software service has been used as a political weapon. The removal of soft power influence is not common as it reduces America’s influence in a way that the undoubted hard power America posses could not realistically replace.
The Chinese government already sees Google as a bad actor and so are probably thrilled.
Well, you can buy Huawei phone and be spied on by the Chinese, or you can buy Apple and be spied on by Chinese and by the USA. Same goes for other smartphone brands.
Iapx432,
US actions are being driven by the trump administration’s trade war, however you are right this actually motivates china to lesson it’s dependence on US companies just as much as the other way around. US companies stand to loose as much as china because it diminishes the ability of US companies to compete in the biggest market on the planet. This plan may have been poorly thought out.
Looking at the bigger picture, much of this trade war is built on false premises. The chinese aren’t succeeding because they’re stealing, they’re succeeding because they’re more efficient at delivering the goods at a fraction of the cost. For a country pumped up on free market economics, we certainly suck at it. There’s 90% fat at the top of our companies, we could cut it out and we’d be far more competitive around the world. However time and time again, the executives running the company refuse to trim the fat and instead cut out the meat. This is just one recent example, but it happens constantly…
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ford-layoffs-cutting-7000-white-collar-jobs-05-20-2019/
This has become the normal culture of US corporations. Executives sit on their fortunes, which are worth more than whole countries, making huge salaries through good years and bad while blaming everyone but themselves for the company’s competitive difficulties. US companies have become unwilling/unable to compete on merit, instead focusing on political solutions to float them above the tide, and that’s what this trade war is about.
Can such inefficient entities be sustainable? Well no, not normally: more efficient competitors in a free market tend to eat away incumbent leads. However the new corporate tax cuts will inject trillions of dollars into private US companies, which will pump their balance sheets even if they change nothing at all. Of course their gains are being subsidized through public taxpayer debt and loss of public programs. Theoretically, to the extent that we remain committed to forgoing public services, health care, infrastructure upgrades, etc in order to keep our inefficient companies afloat, that trade-off might actually be sustainable. But are the costs worth it just to keep fat salaried executives in business? My opinion is no, they don’t deserve to say in business if they cannot compete naturally. Yes, it is a problem that US companies are loossing a competitive edge, however politicians are unwise to institute policies and tax cuts that enable them to continue business as usual rather than encouraging them to become actually become more efficient and competitive and even allowing the free market to cull bloated companies naturally via survival of the fittest.
Hum, what you have described have been true for something close to 40 years, even though, the situation got even more “unfair” with time. The “war on unions” created a situation where there are very little things USA employees can do, like choosing wisely their representatives, which they failed systematically.
Specifically about the Ford and GM case, that was to be expected as we see more and more advances on management systems, same for blue collars and automation. Unluckily, not even engineering is going to escape the scythe. Nothing will be left untouched when AI finally show its true, wide reach.
On my notoriously pessimistic view, the current situation is actually a consequence of top greedy echelons barricading themselves for uncertain times they can’t anticipate.
Like what happened on middle of last century, I hope they will wake up for the utility of having a mass of people to consume their goodies, but on a society that got an elite so greedy as USA has now, my hopes are somewhat dim.
acobar,
Yeah, the corruption is really alarming. And beyond that there are too many foolish voters casting their votes for con men who’ve built their careers on swindling people. For some reason we never wise up to it. To be fair, it’s not entirely the fault of the voters: gerrymandering, campaign financing policy, deliberately closing nearby poles and reducing voting hours, winner take all elections, and the electoral college also impede us from having a fair representative government. While many of these things *could* be fixed, I am rather pessimistic that they actually will be. After all, the parties in charge both benefit from the status quo.
Global organised labour suffered a huge defeat between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. This happened for a number of reasons but perhaps the most important was that about a billion new workers were added to the international capitalist work force, primarily as a result of the collapse or abolition of the command economies in places like the ex-soviet union countries, eastern Europe, China and Vietnam. This sudden influx of low paid, compliant and non-organised labour, combined with the collapse of the old Keynesian social democratic model, meant that the balance between labour and capital in the old western liberal social democracies was deeply transformed. Organised labour was significantly weakened globally. The result is predictable. Greater inequality, stagnating wage growth, much greater job insecurity and an erosion of social welfare provision. Until labour in places like China can effectively organise in independent and reasonable strong trade unions it is unlikely that the global balance between capital and labour will improve.
I’m a bit less “optimistic” about it than you seem to be. The way I see it, corporate managers learned really fast how to use the new scenario to gain the most they could: they used the card of automation and globalization to frighten the will of employees to fight for better conditions and to extract the most benefits from administrators of regions through tax breaks and “free” services (actually, getting taxpayers to pay for some of their needs, like infrastructure), many times creating a competition of what region gives more. The only chance I see to revert this is by international coordination of governments and trade unions, not something easy to construct in front of current rise of nationalism around the world.
Globalization, i.e. the movement of manufacturing (and coding) off shore, was the biggest factor in the defeat of labour. Semi-skilled long tenure co-located manufacturing jobs were replaced in the economic hierarchy by either transient dispersed un-skilled service positions or low level college educated semi-management positions. The former could not organize effectively without being moved or fired. The latter considered itself to part of management and so were disinclined to organize and would have been viewed with suspicion by traditional hard line unions in any case.
Ironically, a potential positive effect of Trumps trade antagonism towards China may be to cause the US to restore some manufacturing and to cause China to allow its middle class to grow even faster. The end game here would be more like pre-globalization where you have peer nations competing on an equal footing based on creative and specialization merit vs cost base merit.
The Chinese, and Asians in general, absolutely love western brands. The West is infinitely more skilled at present at developing brands. The West needs Asian manufacturing, even at a higher price, because the necessary supply chain depth cannot be recreated quickly in the West.
In summary, this could end up in a good place, if we can make it through the transition without a real war, vs a trade war.
Africa is a wild card, hence the massive Chinese investment in Africa. If we had to suffer globalization asymmetry a little longer to accelerate African development then I am fine with that. It could happen very quickly as they already have a lot of the ingredients in their young people.
Addressing wealth distribution is a different matter. That requires socialism, which does not work everywhere.
There’s something to be said for controlling the entire stack of a supply chain for your product. Microsoft’s internal process for sourcing and using privileged access workstations is a good model for anyone that intends to build a secure mobile device. This is similar to the reason that the Russian government has mandated a move to SailfishOS for all govt departments. q.v. AuroraOS
‘They already have an app store: https://huaweimobileservices.com/appgallery/ Do not forget, their phones sold in China didn’t had Play Store even before.’
Build an App store? All Huawei has to do is hook up with Aptoide.
Basically every website has reported about the 90 day reprieve/delay, but here on OSAlert there isn’t any mention of that: https://www.google.com/search?q=huawei+google+90+day&rlz=1C1GCEB_enNL826NL826&oq=huawei+google+90+day&aqs=chrome..69i57.4654j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
This was my first experience with Huawei
https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-correcting-the-record
I’m sure they’ve grown and are doing their own things, but the early stage cheating still has a sour taste in my mouth. I mean I hate cisco too, don’t get me wrong here just for different reasons.
Also this is going to put another nail in the coffin of Android TV. It’s already not very popular on the various Chinese TV Boxes, and this isn’t going to help matters any.