Huawei downplayed the Google problem in the Mate 30, but it’s a major issue for consumers

[F-22Raptor]

When Huawei finally unveiled the latest addition to its flagship smartphone lineup yesterday there were few surprises, given the many leaks in the buildup to the big day. The one thing everyone was talking about ahead of the launch event in Munich, however, was how Huawei planned to circumvent the gargantuan elephant in the room: a blanket ban on Google’s apps and services.

By way of a brief recap, Huawei was placed on a U.S. trade blacklist earlier this year that prohibits all U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese tech giant. This meant Huawei could not use software from companies such as Google on future phones, though existing devices would still receive software updates. In effect, this ban seemed likely to push Huawei toward the open source version of Android for its new smartphones, meaning no Google Play, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, or other Google services Android users have become accustomed to.

Ahead of yesterday’s event, Google confirmed that — as expected — the Huawei Mate 30 lineup would not feature its services. However, there remained an air of doubt, with speculation that Huawei would somehow produce a magical workaround out of thin air. On stage during yesterday’s press conference, Huawei’s consumer tech CEO Richard Yu performed a big song and dance over the amazing hardware in the new flagships, but he curiously made almost no mention of the operating system that would be shipping with the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro devices.

Similarly, in the wake of yesterday’s launch event, none of the official press materials made mention of Google or the lack of apps, and such information is also conspicuously absent from the phone’s official home on the web. This all provides us with an important clue to Huawei’s plan for addressing the billion-dollar Google problem: Keep as quiet as possible about it, and focus instead on the hardware and alternatives to Google’s services.

“This is the best-performing smartphone in the world,” said Yu in a press briefing, before briefly acknowledging the question on everyone’s mind. “Yes, we have some limitations on Google mobile services. But we have a huge advantage with the phone itself.”

Beyond Google
Rather than shipping with Google Play, Huawei will focus on its own App Gallery store. Here, users will be able to install popular apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, but countless other category-leading apps for work and leisure will be absent, including Dropbox, Uber, Slack, Spotify, eBay, Strava, Tinder, and Netflix.

Therefore, the nature of the “Google problem” extends much further than Google — lots of popular apps beyond Gmail et al simply aren’t available. Moreover, many dubious-looking copycat apps designed to resemble the real thing suggest the curatorial oversight in Huawei’s app store is lacking.
By underplaying the Google factor, and the lack of apps across the board, Huawei raises the real risk that people will buy or upgrade to the new Mate 30 series without realizing that they won’t be able to access Google’s hugely popular services out of the box, not to mention the dozens of other third-party apps they’re accustomed to. Many consumers will, of course, do their homework, but equally many won’t — they’ll be offered an appealing upgrade as part of their contract and assume it is effectively the same phone but with a better camera.

To put it another way: Will a 25-year-old, who typically listens to Spotify in their Uber ride to meet their Tinder date (while intermittently checking in on work through Slack and Gmail), be happy to discover that their $1,000 phone isn’t up to the task?

Huawei can talk about amazing cameras until the cows come home, but without the apps, impressive specs only go so far. You only have to look back to Windows Phone for precedent. Microsoft and Nokia produced some truly great hardware in the form of their Lumia phones, but they were doomed in large part by the app ecosystem failing to take off.

It’s worth noting that there are workarounds to Huawei’s Google problem. It’s possible to sideload apps, and users can access some of the services relatively easily through their browser, while alternative apps may work just fine in other cases. But this all amounts to huge friction and a sub-par experience. When people are shelling out around $1,000 for a device, they want it to work as expected.

Based on all the images and videos released so far, the new Mate 30 devices look pretty stunning, and they pack an impressive list of features. But for most consumers, it’s what on the inside that counts in the long run.

So how will Huawei market the device when it actually goes on sale in the coming weeks? Will the phones come packaged with an “Intel Inside”-style note that says something like “No Google inside”? Will salespeople be instructed to caution buyers that the Mate 30 phones pack very different apps from last year’s Mate 20 series? These are important questions, because transparency is pivotal to retaining consumer trust.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/20/...-mate-30-but-its-a-major-issue-for-consumers/

 

[Fawadqasim1]

It can be sideloaded relatively easily.

 

[royalharris]

The google service can be installed by customer himself
Huawei just let customer decide install google APP or not，free choice

 

[nang2]

The google service can be installed by customer himself
Huawei just let customer decide install google APP or not，free choice

It is probably not a bad idea. I hate to have pre-installed APPs that I never use but keep on updating themselves, taking up precious space.

 

[Fawadqasim1]

competitive pricing will totally mitigate this problem. It's not a big issue

 

[Clutch]

The article fails to mention you can install google app store and services just like all the other applications the article mentions..

Article is just sensationalism

 

[Beast]

China huawei mate 30 pro is the best value for money smartphone. No need additional cost to pay for GMS while still able to enjoy Google Play store apps with just a 30mins self install move once and for all. While the hardware with Kirin 990 and superior camera with super slowmo beats everything....

The article fails to mention you can install google app store and services just like all the other applications the article mentions..

Article is just sensationalism

OP attempt to undermined Huawei mate 3 pro just backfired.. LOL..

This smartphone hardware is simply too powerful to ignore and software of google play can just easily install by user... You paid samsung and other android smartphone which will included license fee of Google while this needs not.

 

[zectech]

why would anyone want the cia on their phone?

Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance

By Jeff NesbitDecember 8, 2017
Former director of legislative and public affairs, National Science Foundation
Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.

But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.

Backstory: The intelligence community and Silicon Valley
In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.

The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes.
A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?

Answering this question was of great interest to the intelligence community.

Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.

To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities who were creating this supercomputing revolution. These scientists were developing ways to do what no single group of human beings sitting at work stations in the NSA and the CIA could ever hope to do: gather huge amounts of data and make intelligent sense of it.

A rich history of the government’s science funding
There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.

The internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort.
In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.

Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.

The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project
MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

Over the next few years, the program’s stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm, Symantec, Netscape, and others, and funded the pivotal research in areas like Doppler radar and fiber optics, which are central to large companies like AccuWeather, Verizon, and AT&T today. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.

The CIA and NSA’s end goal
The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing.
Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, computer-science boy wonders
In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.

It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.

The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.

Left out of Google’s story
The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.

Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.

Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google.
To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The intelligence community’s enduring legacy within Silicon Valley
Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.

Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. “Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet,” says the ACLU. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.”

When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies—from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.

But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.

In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.


https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true...nd-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/

 

[ARMalik]

Huawei Does not need Google OS be successful. Here is a perfect example of this - APPLE. So these idiots can spread all the propaganda they want, but Huawei already has an OS and very quickly it will create an eco system of its own thanks to 1.5 Billion Chinese customers. The quicker Huawei gets rid of Google and other OS, the better it is for Huawei and China.

 

[zectech]

Why the nothings in the West want 5G soon.

Quantum computers can bypass any firewall, any encryption, and security. And google now has that. And google is a CIA front group. Google has super fast speed to download what is on your phone or computer, but if you only have 1 Mbs upload, google can't scan your computer or phone quick enough. Enter 5G and google can copy your entire phone's contents in a few minutes being connected to youtube. This is also why Washington wants to destroy any chance China has in 5G towers, China can monitor this and report this to the public. If you are getting 5G from a CIA front group, linked to youtube, a CIA front group... you have no privacy. They can record video from your camera's phone in real time, get photographs of you and your mistress to bribe you. This is the future. And the West stood in line for it.

Watch the film, enemy of the state, and things are about to get totalitarian, worse than Stalin, worse than enemy of the state, pretty soon. What will be different, is the mass public won't even notice this. They'll be too busy hating foreigners and brown people.

China is the light out of this dictatorship.

Ron Paul could have stopped this, but 'Muricans are too busy cheering that Libertarians are being banned from youtube, twitter and facebook. Each of those businesses is a CIA op.

But who cares about the hell hole of 'Murica.

BTW, 5G is unhealthy too. As any cellphone radiation is unhealthy, the more power and speed, the worse.

 

[Beast]

Google play service On Huawei mate 30 pro (No bootloader)

 

[macnurv]

WTF are you talking about? I am already using P30 Pro and its fully functional with all google services. Not to mention Huawei is actively promoting its own app store for their phones to encourage developers to submit their apps. They had already spent over a billion dollars on its development, it might take sometime but eventually it will take off.

As for google services, they can be downloaded separately and installed, or separately download the apks, is it a hassle, Yes but not enough to keep me away from a better phone of my choice.

As for mate 30 pro, right now Huawei have not announced the date for its launch in Europe.

When Huawei finally unveiled the latest addition to its flagship smartphone lineup yesterday there were few surprises, given the many leaks in the buildup to the big day. The one thing everyone was talking about ahead of the launch event in Munich, however, was how Huawei planned to circumvent the gargantuan elephant in the room: a blanket ban on Google’s apps and services.

By way of a brief recap, Huawei was placed on a U.S. trade blacklist earlier this year that prohibits all U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese tech giant. This meant Huawei could not use software from companies such as Google on future phones, though existing devices would still receive software updates. In effect, this ban seemed likely to push Huawei toward the open source version of Android for its new smartphones, meaning no Google Play, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, or other Google services Android users have become accustomed to.

Ahead of yesterday’s event, Google confirmed that — as expected — the Huawei Mate 30 lineup would not feature its services. However, there remained an air of doubt, with speculation that Huawei would somehow produce a magical workaround out of thin air. On stage during yesterday’s press conference, Huawei’s consumer tech CEO Richard Yu performed a big song and dance over the amazing hardware in the new flagships, but he curiously made almost no mention of the operating system that would be shipping with the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro devices.

Similarly, in the wake of yesterday’s launch event, none of the official press materials made mention of Google or the lack of apps, and such information is also conspicuously absent from the phone’s official home on the web. This all provides us with an important clue to Huawei’s plan for addressing the billion-dollar Google problem: Keep as quiet as possible about it, and focus instead on the hardware and alternatives to Google’s services.

“This is the best-performing smartphone in the world,” said Yu in a press briefing, before briefly acknowledging the question on everyone’s mind. “Yes, we have some limitations on Google mobile services. But we have a huge advantage with the phone itself.”

Beyond Google
Rather than shipping with Google Play, Huawei will focus on its own App Gallery store. Here, users will be able to install popular apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, but countless other category-leading apps for work and leisure will be absent, including Dropbox, Uber, Slack, Spotify, eBay, Strava, Tinder, and Netflix.

Therefore, the nature of the “Google problem” extends much further than Google — lots of popular apps beyond Gmail et al simply aren’t available. Moreover, many dubious-looking copycat apps designed to resemble the real thing suggest the curatorial oversight in Huawei’s app store is lacking.
By underplaying the Google factor, and the lack of apps across the board, Huawei raises the real risk that people will buy or upgrade to the new Mate 30 series without realizing that they won’t be able to access Google’s hugely popular services out of the box, not to mention the dozens of other third-party apps they’re accustomed to. Many consumers will, of course, do their homework, but equally many won’t — they’ll be offered an appealing upgrade as part of their contract and assume it is effectively the same phone but with a better camera.

To put it another way: Will a 25-year-old, who typically listens to Spotify in their Uber ride to meet their Tinder date (while intermittently checking in on work through Slack and Gmail), be happy to discover that their $1,000 phone isn’t up to the task?

Huawei can talk about amazing cameras until the cows come home, but without the apps, impressive specs only go so far. You only have to look back to Windows Phone for precedent. Microsoft and Nokia produced some truly great hardware in the form of their Lumia phones, but they were doomed in large part by the app ecosystem failing to take off.

It’s worth noting that there are workarounds to Huawei’s Google problem. It’s possible to sideload apps, and users can access some of the services relatively easily through their browser, while alternative apps may work just fine in other cases. But this all amounts to huge friction and a sub-par experience. When people are shelling out around $1,000 for a device, they want it to work as expected.

Based on all the images and videos released so far, the new Mate 30 devices look pretty stunning, and they pack an impressive list of features. But for most consumers, it’s what on the inside that counts in the long run.

So how will Huawei market the device when it actually goes on sale in the coming weeks? Will the phones come packaged with an “Intel Inside”-style note that says something like “No Google inside”? Will salespeople be instructed to caution buyers that the Mate 30 phones pack very different apps from last year’s Mate 20 series? These are important questions, because transparency is pivotal to retaining consumer trust.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/20/...-mate-30-but-its-a-major-issue-for-consumers/

 

[Beast]

WTF are you talking about? I am already using P30 Pro and its fully functional with all google services. Not to mention Huawei is actively promoting its own app store for their phones to encourage developers to submit their apps. They had already spent over a billion dollars on its development, it might take sometime but eventually it will take off.

As for google services, they can be downloaded separately and installed, or separately download the apks, is it a hassle, Yes but not enough to keep me away from a better phone of my choice.

As for mate 30 pro, right now Huawei have not announced the date for its launch in Europe.

He is a american sourgraped. Jealous of rising China taking over many innovation and power from US. So posting garbage article to make his american gang feel better.

US has lost the ability to innovate and enrich the livelihood for mankind. Everything is based on massive profit and undermined the others if rival are better.

 

[Menthol]

I once bought a phone from China.

There's no Play Store or anything Google.

Must installed by myself.


But I quite disappoint with Huawei Mate 30.

I thought they are going to use HarmonyOS in this one.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

I thought they are going to use HarmonyOS in this one.

It has to be modified to support phones. It was primarily designed as a generic operating system for IoT devices.