Huawei has long struggled with attacks by the United States government. The company suffered in both hardware and software. In the most recent advance, the company had to close its Kirin chipset division. In November, the company took a drastic step – it sold the Honor smartphone division.
For those who don’t know, Honor started out as a line of Huawei smartphones and quickly evolved into a separate brand. Huawei was one of the first Chinese giants to launch a sub-brand on the market. For a long time, Huawei shared its software and resources with Honor smartphones. But now that the company has been sold to a Chinese group, that will change very soon.
Honor will now flourish on its own, and not being a Huawei-owned company has some benefits. The biggest one now is being able to do business with American companies, including Google. Huawei lost access to Google Apps a long time ago, which made the company run to develop its own ecosystem, which comes in the form of Huawei Mobile Services and AppGallery. Things got even more complicated last year, when the license for Android updates expired, which means the company can no longer upgrade its smartphones to Android 11. Instead, it will be necessary to start the rapid migration to HarmonyOS.
Future Honor smartphones will include Google Mobile Services
As an independent company, Honor is free to use Google Mobile Services and continue to navigate the waters of Android. According to a report in a renowned Russian newspaper, Honor is working on a new line of smartphones that can run Google services. The report states that the separation from Huawei means that the AppGallery will be available for current honor phones. However, new devices will not have easy access to the HMS ecosystem. Honor launched non-GMS phones over the course of 18 months and now, we are about to see a return to the world of Google.
At the moment, it is not clear what are the first smartphones that come with GMS. You can think of the V40 series, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. These phones were developed under the ownership of Huawei, so they will come with Magic UI and will not have GMS access. This is likely to change with the Honor X11 and Honor 40 phones. These devices are likely to include new software and will have free access to Google applications.