Despite the fact that the confrontation Huawei and the United States has been going on for more than a year and a half, it seems that it will never end. Every time it seems that the Americans have finally fallen behind Huawei, and she begins to breathe deeply, they come up with new ways to crush her. At first Huawei they simply deprived of access to Google services, then its partners were threatened with sanctions if they did not stop making proprietary processors for it, and then something happened that no one expected at all – she was forbidden to update her smartphones. As a participant in the events, I tell you what came of it.
Huawei lost early access to updates
The ban on updates came into effect last month. The Americans expanded the sanctions, emphasizing that local companies should have already gotten rid of dependence on Huawei and can now finally break off relations with it. For the Chinese manufacturer, this turned into a ban on updating even old smartphones that came out before the imposition of sanctions and, logically, should not have been subject to restrictions. True, this can only be called a limitation formally, because in fact, users have not lost anything from this.
How smartphones are updated
Previously, Google provided Huawei updates a month before the release, and now – in fact
As it was before? In accordance with the terms of the agreement, Google provided Huawei security updates for the next month in the previous month. That is, the sources of the August patch came to the Chinese in July, the July patch in June, and the June patch in May. But now Huawei have been deprived of this privilege, but she only has the opportunity to take the source of the updates on the website of the search giant, which publishes them in the public domain. The only catch is that the sources are only released online after the actual release.
Last night, I received the so-called 'monthly' security update Android for my Honor View 20 and was slightly confused. After all, how is this possible? After all, it is infinitely impossible to bypass US sanctions, and the Chinese did not release Android 11 precisely because of the restrictions imposed on them. But as soon as I looked at the build number and the update description, everything fell into place. After all, the released patch turned out to be not September, but August. It turns out that the update came with a month and a half delay. But what difference does that make?
How the sanctions affected users Huawei
If you think something has changed since US sanctions tightened, don't worry.
Essentially nothing. If you remember, a few months ago I complained that Huawei didn't care about supporting my smartphones. At best, what awaits you if you buy a device from this brand is one update every three months. Of course, there was one exception that happened in April. Then Huawei rolled out the April security patch exactly for my birthday, but the lafa ended there, and updates began to be released about once every three months. What do we see now? And the fact that Huawei, so as not to disappoint its customers in the end, accelerated and released the August patch with a delay of just a little more than a month. So far, this is the best indicator for the entire year.
Let's once again go over the main points to consolidate:
- The ban on updates is formal, because Huawei can take updates from the Google website;
- However Huawei can take updates from the Google website only after their release, which means that it will release them, at best, with a delay of a whole month, or even more;
- For Huawei the norm is to release updates with a delay of 2-3 months relative to Google;
- Huawei never released monthly security updates every month, skipping multiple patches at a time.
What we have in the bottom line. Are we losing something due to US sanctions? Probably not. After all, smartphone users Huawei and Honor haven't been spoiled for updates before. Another thing is that EMUI 11 turned out to be really unpleasant. Due to the fact that the Chinese did not receive the source code Android 11, they had to build an updated firmware based on last year's Android 10. Is this good? Obviously not, but what will come of it in fact, we can only find out, but so far I am rather disappointed than happy with the current situation.