A. GOOGLE VS HUAWEI. File photo of Google logo by Josh Edelson/AFP. File photo of Huawei logo by Pau Barrena/AFP
The race of global dominance and supremacy is not unknown to this world. Long before the industrial revolution, nations fought over territory, resources, food, religion and the list goes on to the trivial reasons one can imagine today. As the world progressed, the magnitude of such conflicts amplified, involving more and more people. History bears witness today to the wrangling of countries in an unending feud over industrial, scientific, racial, and more recently, technological fields.
B. Illustration: iStock
Since the start of the year 2018, People’s Republic of China and the United States of America have come at par with each other over the placement of taxes on imports and exports between the two countries. Before even taking the office, US President Donald Trump had been actively speaking against “China’s long-time abuse of the broken international system and unfair practices”. According to the claims made by the US, intellectual property rights are being sabotaged by supporting foreign business corporations to work in joint ventures with Chinese firms. Consequently, this provides them access to exploit the US technology and puts them at serious threat of going out of business from the word market.
Donald Trump might have been cautioned against putting the world economy at such a risk by escalating the US-China trade war as such a step could cause consequential damage to not only the United State’s economy but also to the rest of the world. But, the situation looks far from being back to normal. Curtis S. Chin, a public speaker, author, former ambassador and policy maker, while in an interview to CNBC said,
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better”.
The situation worsened with the arrest of a top executive of Huawei that caused serious threats to derail the shaky trade agreement between the United States and China on December 1st, 2018. Meng Wanzhou, the Chinese tech company’s chief financial officer, was apprehended in Canada at the appeal of US authorities. Wanzhou was alleged by US of supporting Huawei in concealing violations of US sanctions on Iran.US lawmakers adopted a similar reproachful attitude to denounce Huawei by saying it poses a national threat to the US.
Huawei is Shenzhen-based Chinese Tech Company that produces smartphones and other communication equipment. In the year 2018, Huawei became world’s second-largest phone maker, behind Samsung. According to the International Data Corporation, Huawei sold more phones than Apple. Huawei also seems to have been at the pole position in race of 5G networking connectivity.
Escalating tensions at the diplomatic level between US and China, Donald Trump restricted business ties of the companies in the US with Huawei by passing an executive order. While such restrictions do hardly any harm to the tech giant in terms of hardware. However, the recent ban of Google services to Huawei has seriously put its market supremacy at sake. Huawei is being removed by Google from its Android Partner Program saying that access to all services and applications of Google will no longer be supported for Huawei’s phone. Also users will also not be able to side-load applications’ APKs for such services as Google bars unverified devices from running its applications. In addition to it, all other applications beside Google, will not be able to facilitate Google APIs feature such log-in, payments and cloud storage.
Although, existing users will continue to update their applications through Android’s native Google Play Store. However the barring also forbids Honor and Huawei from sending updates to the users’ smartphones. Eventually, Huawei will also not have access to the security patches that are sent by Google on monthly basis before the public release.
It looks as if Huawei can only continue using Android OS on its phones by developing its own version of Android using Android Open Source Project. Also, hinted by its executive in recent statements, Huawei has been reportedly working on developing its own OS as the usage of Android after US-China trade conflicts was certain to happen someday. How efficiently Huawei comes out of this problem remains a question in the minds of its user as it has captured quite a base in smartphone market.
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