Although the ban has been delayed and Microsoft has resumed its authorization to Huawei, the recovery of Google Mobile Service (GMS for short) is still in the foreseeable future.
In May this year, Google suspended the provision of GMS services to Huawei phones under the influence of the “Entity List” incident. Because of this restriction, mobile phones sold by Huawei in overseas markets will not be able to use Gmail, YouTube, Google Pay, navigation and other services under the original factory settings.
The absence of GMS has a significant impact on overseas markets, and the most direct response is sales.
Seeing no hope of recovery, Huawei chose the plan of launching spare tires, which is HMS.
How is HMS going?
HMS is progressing faster than we expected, at least compared to Hongmeng OS.
According to the Economic Times Reporting , HMS is actively pushing forward. Huawei stated that Huawei is working with Indian developers to develop Replace GMS applications and services on their phones. In addition, the sub-brand Honor is negotiating with 150 of India’s top apps for use in its HMS or Huawei Media Services.
Huawei said that the current navigation, payment, game and notification push will be ready soon. The original report was “deployed before the end of the year”, but it was subsequently revised. It seems that the speed is not as optimistic as expected.
Charles Peng, Huawei ’s head of Indian consumer business, revealed that HMS will support smartphones that cannot access GMS.
“Consumers will not find any difference between GMS and HMS,” he added, and the Indian developer base will help India and Europe, and in each country, Huawei hopes to provide it through HMS 100 to 150 applications, including Facebook, Whatsapp, etc.
Huawei also stated that it currently has approximately 1 million registered developers of HMS worldwide, and Huawei will also provide a global fund of US $ 1 billion and provide incentives up to US $ 17,000.
In China, HMS has begun public testing in China. The content is divided into two parts: Huawei Mobile Services and HMS Core Test, which provide functions such as Huawei account, in-app payment, message notification, and wallet.
At present, the official website of Huawei Developers has also placed “HMS Core” on the homepage prominently, and also provided a small application market model, which includes Game, Fido & Safety, Purchase, Identity, Scan, Nearby, ML, etc. application.
Message Show , except for Mate 30, nova 6 Honor V30 and other mobile phones that could not be pre-installed with GMS due to the “Entity List” ban. Other earlier Huawei phones can also successfully deploy HMS services. Even HMS and Google GMS can coexist in the system.
HMS can provide basic low-level capabilities, such as payment portals (not via Google Pay), navigation capabilities, game centers, and more. But “not feeling the difference” is a little too optimistic. For example, overseas, some core Google applications are still unavailable.
However, the progress of HMS is indeed a step by step. After the underlying architecture is set up, it can provide access for Huawei’s own and third-party applications. At least on the platform, it has been initially prepared.
A few days ago, Huawei confirmed next year The quarterly P40 and P40 Pro smartphones will be pre-installed with Huawei Mobile Services instead of Google Mobile Services (GMS).
Whether Huawei believes that the impact of the ban will continue or that HMS is ready, in short, GMS will not return on Huawei phones in the short term. Huawei has not lowered its sales target for next year. If it wants to achieve this goal, it is bound to have alternatives. Compared with the open source AOSP (Android Open Source Project), the lack of GMS is a more urgent problem to be solved.
Not a replacement, but a reconstruction?
GMS is the “nucleus” that Google injects into Android. The importance is self-evident. Google search, maps, payments, YouTube and other applications all rely on the underlying capabilities of GMS. Does not “monopolize” Android, but realizes a substantial ecological construction through GMS.
HMS is still at a very early stage. In terms of the number of applications, HMS currently has only 45,000 applications that use the HMS kernel, and Google Play has more than 3 million.
The good news is that Google’s services are not sweeping the globe.
Russia has Yandex, South Korea has Naver, and some other populous countries (such as India) also have the potential to develop their own applications. If Huawei can cooperate with these applications, it can offset the impact of losing GMS to a certain extent.
On December 3, the Huawei Voice Community announced the full text of Ren Zhengfei’s recent interview with CNN. Ren Zhengfei said that if the United States made clear that the Google GMS ecosystem was not used by Huawei, Huawei’s own system would also be put into use. Ren Zhengfei stated that Huawei was able to complete the integration of the world’s ecosystem within 2 to 3 years.
In addition, with the nurture of this huge market in mainland China, HMS can achieve a certain scale of launch results, and Huawei has the opportunity to continue to iterate, but whether it can be verified in the process of going to sea depends on specific effects, such as How many capable partners can get support.
Interestingly, we have seen OPPO in the cooperation announced by Huawei in India. In addition to cooperating with Huawei, OPPO plans to allocate US $ 143 million in 2020 to support global developers, including India, to work together Develop “new smart service ecosystem”. Those with such ambitions are obviously not just the Huaweis.
Google’s application is the core of GMS. This is not something Huawei can do. HMS is not so much a replacement for GMS as it is for Huawei to rebuild a complete ecosystem, relying on AOSP, but independent of Google.
This is still a long way, and it is not inevitable. Do n’t be surprised if cooperation resumes someday.