Reply to post: Re: Surely Huawei can just facilitate the user adding these?

Huawei new smartphone won't be Mate-y with Google apps as trade sanctions kick in

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Surely Huawei can just facilitate the user adding these?

This proves my point. You have a phone with the required APIs, and all the apps work. Huawei's phone won't have those. Almost all of the apps from FDroid will work perfectly. Many of the apps on the play store will also work perfectly when sideloaded or retrieved from the store by one of the apps you mentioned. However, if an app uses Play Services or another one of Google's proprietary APIs, and many do, the app won't work when installed. It will install properly, but when you try to launch it, it will reach a point where it crashes or doesn't work properly. In order to fix that, a user has to install the required APIs. These exist, but they're not listed on FDroid or in the Play Store itself as Google thinks they've been shipped as part of the default firmware. So the user will have to look for the APKs online, find the versions that run on their hardware, and install them in the correct order. I have no doubt that, when this phone is released, someone will create those APKs and publish them in a matter of days. Users will just have to find an uninfected copy of those and install them correctly. As I said, it's doable, but not without effort.

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