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Huawei’s first non-Android smartphone with HarmonyOS will arrive in 2021: what will happen to smartphones already on offer? Will they get an update?
The announcement of the Chinese brand about a new phone without Android and with HarmonyOS from 2021 caused considerable anxiety among Huawei smartphone owners. Many people fear that Huawei will quickly abandon the Android ecosystem, preventing users from updating their smartphones to the next versions of Google’s operating system.
The worsening of this feeling is another announcement from Huawei: smartphones that will receive EMUI 11 will be able to update to HarmonyOS 2.0 in 2021. Two questions arise at this point. The first is: which Huawei smartphones will be able to upgrade to HarmonyOS? All or only those that will appear in the coming months? The second and more important question is, will the HarmonyOS upgrade be mandatory or optional? There are no official answers to these questions yet, but there are some signals from Huawei that could prove to be important clues.
Huawei mobile services increasingly advanced
The first sign that should be taken into account when trying to understand what the future of Huawei smartphones will be after saying goodbye to Android is the development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), i.e. services developed by the Chinese giant since it can no longer use normal Google Mobile Services (GMS).
These services act as a link between different installed applications, for example, allowing you to share content created in one application with another application or open a link received from a messaging application in your browser.
They also serve as an alternative to the Play Store (replaced by AppGallery) and the Google system for searching and updating applications (replaced by Petal Search). Huawei P40 has no GMS but HMS and it works very well overall.
Huawei spends a lot of money to encourage developers to create applications that can also use HMS, so they can run even without official Android support. Since November 2019, the company has made available $ 1 billion as incentives to cover the costs of creating compatible applications.
The incentive program has already paid off – there are almost 100,000 applications in the AppGallery. However, we are still talking about applications running on Android, albeit without Google Mobile Services.
Petal Search and Celia
Not all HMS-compatible apps are published on the AppGallery: many developers publish them on alternative stores. That’s why Huawei launched Petal Search in June, a special application that searches for such applications and offers them to users. But lately, Petal has been doing something else: offering search results from Microsoft Bing or other alternative search engines to Google.
Some are already saying that Huawei is saying goodbye not only to Android but also to Google Search, replacing it with Petal. The hypothesis is not entirely remote considering that the Chinese company also developed a voice assistant called Celia some time ago, which it plans to integrate into Petal. This means that sooner or later, voice searches made by Huawei users may no longer pass through Google Search, but through Petal Search.
Huawei smartphones, what’s next with updates
If you’re wondering which Huawei smartphones will continue to receive Android updates, even after Huawei unveiled the first HarmonyOS smartphone, then you need to be patient to get the answer: Huawei has not officially announced it.
And he probably won’t do so before the US presidential election in November, which could elect a US president other than Donald Trump, who could loosen the famous ban that caused it all.
All of the above long indications, however, show that Huawei is preparing a “plan B” to be implemented sooner rather than later if the situation goes south. One of the most plausible assumptions is that Huawei will continue to update Android smartphones for as long as it can, but in 2021 it will show the world an Android-free phone with enough top-of-the-line features for many users to want to try it out.
If Huawei can continue to update the EMUI on its smartphones, it will certainly do so as it has no interest in getting away from Android. But if it can’t do that anymore due to the worsening of the US ban, then it will strive to be ready with a top-notch Android-less smartphone with great features and a solid app ecosystem already in place.
The worst-case scenario will be a transitional period during which Huawei Android smartphones will only receive security updates, while new HarmonyOS 2.0 devices will show the world what Huawei can do without Google.
