The Huawei Ban: Explained!

[Music] all right we got a lot to talk about hey what's up guys i'm kim Bhd here and you may have recently seen some version of the news that Huawei was cut off from Google and now all their Android devices are in limbo but clearly there's a lot more to it this is a super complex topic with policy and timelines and a whole bunch of moving parts so I clearly didn't rush this video out I wanted to actually take my time to summarize this topic but here we are so this is everything you need to know so far in one place so Huawei in case you didn't already know based in China huge company absolutely massive and they have all kinds of businesses in tech they sell networking equipment they sell computers and they sell most notably smartphones they are the number two largest by market share smartphone vendor on planet Earth second only to Samsung and right above Apple so as you may have heard or read in the news over the past few months the US and China have been escalating this trade war from both sides plus there's been a history of security concerns over the potential of US companies buying Huawei networking equipment and then possibly getting spied on by the Chinese government US government agencies were even banned from buying Huawei phones at all so no matter how you view those things either way Huawei's status in the US has been pretty shaky for a little while now for various reasons they knew it we knew it that's just the climate we're in so the big new news now is that the US government signed an executive order into effect that added Huawei to effectively a blacklist of companies that are restricted from doing any business with any US company at all period it's been worded a bunch of different ways but that's basically what went down and now the implications from that have run far and why I mean nothing's really rocked the tech world quite like this in a little while so the biggest most obvious headline from this is Google they're a US company Huawei does business with Google they make Android phones so when this executive order came out in response Google complied by stopping all business with Huawei and pulling their license to use Android that wasn't like a choice they made or a decision they had really they're just complying with the executive order Google's in the u.s. Huawei is not allowed to do business with any company in the US they can't be sold any software or any licenses so they can't use Android so this is of course terrible news for why away who by the way was the fastest-growing smartphone manufacturer in the world they were coming up quick on that number one spot so now the big question we're all wondering is what does this mean for the past and present and future Huawei devices so for Huawei devices past and present like if you own a huawei phone like me like a p30 pro or you're thinking about getting a p30 pro or a p30 here's the deal first of all they were issued a 90-day exemption so they will be able to continue sending software updates and security updates to existing Huawei phones for the next 90 days into August so that sort of softens the blow a little bit I guess and I do believe this also includes honor by the way honor being as a brand that's owned completely by Huawei a sub brand of them but honor and Huawei phones are all sort of under the same umbrella so these phones will all still work and they'll still keep getting software updates and also Google tweeted from their Android account that while they comply with US government requirements services like Google Play and security from Google Play protect they will keep functioning on your existing Huawei device for now but these phones if things stay the way they are basically these phones will most certainly stop getting software updates like even if you're not in the US no matter where you are if your wall way phone runs Google services those will stop and you'll study these phones will not get the latest version of Android basically at the end of this 90-day extension whatever software version these phones have is the one that they'll have for the rest of their life which is definitely not ideal so what does Huawei do from here like what can while we do about their future phones and can while we even make future phones without any US business help fun fact they spent seventy billion dollars buying components for Hardware last year eleven billion of that went to US companies like Qualcomm Intel etc and actually our technical as pasta Dan article with a pretty good breakdown of all the parts and components that huawei's been buying to make their smartphones and a lot of them come from US companies the Gorilla Glass the flash storage some radios it's cetera all from us from looking at this list it doesn't seem totally unrealistic that I mean they don't want to obviously but they seem like they could totally switch all of their suppliers from US companies to others to get around this it's not what they want to do involve spending a lot of money and doing a lot of work but they're one of the few OEMs that doesn't rely on Qualcomm for the silicon they make their own Kirin 980 chip for the the may 20 Pro and the P 30 pro so in theory with a lot of effort they could keep making these physical phones and also Bloomberg has reported that Huawei has built up a 3-month stockpile of the parts they like to use ahead of this ban which is actually pretty impressive but even if they did replace all of these Hardware suppliers with alternatives in the next 90 days the software is still the big question how do you make a phone without Google without the Android license without the Google Playstore technically Android itself is open source just bare-bones stock Android is just an open source project which has led many to speculate you don't need a license you're going to do business with Google to just use AOSP so they could use bone stock Android but that's not ideal because even that is further and further from the version Google uses every day and that still doesn't include things like Google services Gmail YouTube it's just not ideal the more I read into it it turns out we always been sort of quietly bracing themselves for something like this for a while similar to Samsung they've recognized their reliance on Google and Google services as a bad thing so they've been slowly building things behind the scenes to be able to get ready to replace them supposedly they've been working on a backup oh s that supports Android apps and they've been working on building their own app store the problem is that is an immense challenge to try to get people to use an alternate OS and an alternate app store especially if it doesn't look exactly the same as the one they're used to especially the App Store and if you can't do business with US companies you can't expect to be able to negotiate your way into getting the Netflix's and Pandora's and Facebook's and instagrams on your alternate App Store and even if you can we've seen others like Amazon try you've seen the Amazon Appstore right Amazon is a multi-billion dollar company and the sad version of an app store that they have is nowhere near a replacement of the ones that were used to so it's a super massive challenge to try to build up your own app store out of nowhere so this spells a lot of work for a while way like it shows how big of an impact just getting cut from your ties with Google can have on your business they've seen this coming they've known that this is possible but now that it's happened it's awful so the way things stand now they could in theory after the 90 days is up continue to make phones entirely through nine US companies but those phones wouldn't have Android they wouldn't have the Google Play services which are crucial and they wouldn't have the Google Play Store it's tough and of course it's not just Google that they're cut off from like that that's the big headlining one because they make a lot of Android phones but there's plenty of other US companies that they do business with Microsoft Intel Nvidia Huawei has been making laptops and pretty good ones mind you competitively for a while now but as far as I can tell they can't keep making Windows laptops without doing business with Microsoft and Intel and NVIDIA and these companies that's brutal too so as a person that really likes tech all of this news is terrible because having one less company means less competition which is less incentive for these companies to work hard and make great stuff I mean we've seen it ourselves with how good their phones have gotten lately and how good they've made all the phones around them even if you're not a fan of Huawei or if you don't like their stuff we have to admit that having them around is good for consumers it's good for us and also side note if you think about it this is also pretty bad just specifically for folding phones like the galaxy fold kind of just had its own PR nightmare all by itself over there for a couple weeks which sort of turned people's heads to the other folding phone that would be coming to market soon which was gonna be the wall a mate X but now I mean what if it came and run Android but hey Wow way is like I said a huge company like a really huge company so I guess if anyone can recover from such a massive setback to multiple parts of their business I guess it's them I mean this is not ideal at all their ideal case would be the government renegotiates things and they reverse the executive order and things go back to normal but in the case that that doesn't happen at least they have billions of dollars to try something but even if they do come back if you think about it the bigger damage might really just be the way people think about Huawei as a company to potentially buy products from you know the reputation isn't exactly great especially in the US so now good luck trying to convince someone to spend a thousand dollars instead of an iPhone on a huawei phone that doesn't even have the Play Store or run Android anymore that's a tough sell if you look back a very similar situation happened to ZTE in 2018 last year they got cut off from all their US business relationships and they were never the same they didn't exactly come back strong from that but Huawei is this Goliath so I'm thinking things will go a bit differently this time or at least I'm hoping things will go differently for the sake of competition but to be honest this whole situation is far from over these things evolve they change over time I would be shocked if this whole thing was reversed in the next couple months just because that's sort of the way things have gone recently but as of right now we're just kind of in this unsatisfying limbo as we speculate about Huawei's future but that's basically all there is to know right now there you have it so that's been it I'll leave all the links for all my sources down below in case you want to read up on this yourself and of course feel free to share this video for anyone who might be headline reading or curious about the situation will always found themselves in right now and I'll catch you guys in the next video peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 7,428,706

Rating: 4.8447642 out of 5

Keywords: Huawei ban, Huawei banned, Huawei banned google, google banned huawei, blacklisted, blacklist, Android, suspended, Huawei Mate X, google suspends, google suspends huawei, huawei vs, huawei android, MKBHD, explained

Id: qZGpmWrVSaU

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/b20vteg]

all I wanna know is if we'll still have access to the play store after these 90 days are up, but nobody's been able to tell me. 🙁

[u/Lazarion21]

So, I get that there won't be any updates for the operation system in the existing phones after the 90-days period, but will all the different apps fron google play get any kind of updates after that period? Anyone knows?

[u/MioGeo]

Silly question but will this all also apply to phones outside of the US?