As part of a protracted war against Huawei, the US placed the company on an entity list, banning any US business or person from working with the Chinese manufacturer. That meant that, while it could use the open source version of Android, which is common in China, Huawei couldn’t use Google’s services. And in the west, the twin worlds of Android and Google Play are seen as indivisible.

The two devices that Huawei has released since the ban, the Honor 9X in China and the Mate 30 series, both ship without Google Play. In its place, Huawei is hoping that its own store, the App Gallery, will mature enough in the west to satisfy people’s thirst for the apps they know and love. That’s not very likely, however, since companies like Facebook have already backed off supporting Huawei devices in future.

Huawei locked the boot loader on the Mate 30, but a nod-and-wink workaround existed for both the Mate 30 and the 9X in the form of LZ Play. If you were prepared to risk your device’s security (LZ Play required administrator rights despite its sketchy provenance) you could download the app and use it to access Google Play. From there, you could then download the apps you crave, and demand, from your Android phone.

Using apps to route around the Google ban is not uncommon, with apps like GO Google Installer being used on western phones brought to China. In this case, however, GO Google Installer didn’t work for the Mate 30 series.

On October 1st, developer John Wu wrote about how LZ Play uses undocumented Huawei APIs inside the OS that are used for device security to trick Google servers. Wu suggested that Huawei knew about the secret tools LZ Play used, and either encouraged, or turned a blind eye to its use. After all, it meant that enthusiasts had a way of getting Google Play onto devices that otherwise would be blocked.

Shortly after publication of Wu’s piece, and the LZ Play website was taken offline, as well as raised hackles in the security community. Android Police speculates that either the developer got cold feet, the hosting provider did, or Huawei itself — if you believe that Huawei was behind the app itself. F

A Huawei spokesperson told Engadget that “Huawei has had no involvement with LZ Play. “

On its side, Google has also moved to block the Mate 30 from being able to use any number of tricks to access Google Play. The company’s SafetyNet system is designed to check if a phone was secure (and had not been rooted or otherwise hacked) enough to run Google’s apps. As Android Central’s Alex Dobie found, the Mate 30 Pro was certified by SafetyNet last week, but its approval has since been pulled.

Soooo uhh this is new.

Since today’s developments, Mate 30 Pro now fails SafetyNet. Last week it passed.

What the what pic.twitter.com/fPeaWUHD2v

— Alex Dobie (@alexdobie) October 1, 2019

Ultimately, the Mate 30 remains a great phone that you shouldn’t buy unless Huawei’s geopolitical fortunes improve. But it’s likely that Google, fearing reprisals for breaking sanctions, will work to ensure that any future workarounds are similarly shut down.

The Pixel 3XL (Left) and the Mate 30 Pro (Right)

You might be familiar with Huawei’s prowess in low-light photography, so in order to test just how powerful Huawei’s latest phone camera is, I went out into my back garden in the dead of night. There’s no artificial light at all, and you need a torch to see where to put your feet, it’s that dark. The Mate 30 Pro, with the ISO set to 409600, didn’t disappoint. It was able to highlight the hopscotch markings my daughter had drawn on the stones.

I’ve repeated this test a couple of times in other pitch-dark areas, and every time, the Mate 30 Pro has highlighted detail. Once again, the night vision capabilities of this thing are genuinely staggering.

When it comes to shooting flexibility, the 8-megapixel telephoto lens offers 3x optical zoom, 5x hybrid or up to 30x digital-only zoom, matching that of the P30 Pro. Details at extreme zoom have been cleaned up a little, and you can certainly get good images at 20x zoom. I wouldn’t recommend pushing things further than that, however, unless you’re trying to do some zapruder-level image forensics.

I won’t say much about the 32-megapixel front-facing camera, since it’s quite similar to the P30’s. There’s all manner of Leica-branded effects, all of which look and feel a lot more natural on this device than its immediate predecessor. But otherwise, if you’re looking to take lots of pictures of your mug, then you’ll find plenty to like about the Mate 30 Pro.

Performance

The Mate 30 phones are the first chance anyone’s been able to test Huawei’s new 7-nanometer Kirin 990 chipset (not to be confused with the more powerful Kirin 990 5G). The 990 packs eight cores: Two big (Cortex-A76 at 2.86GHz), two middle (A76 clocked at 2.09GHz) and four little (A55 clocked at 1.86GHz). Alongside that is a Mali G76 graphics chip and two Ascend D110 Lite neural processing units for facial recognition (the Kirin 990 5G packs an extra Ascend D100 Lite).

The phone is staggeringly quick in normal use, with no discernable delay waiting for Face Unlock to work. The under-display fingerprint sensor is similarly fast, and everything is snappy and responsive in a way you would expect at this sort of price.

Playing Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds is, naturally, a doddle, even with the settings dialed up to 11. (Well, almost: the Epic graphics option on the former is unavailable, I suspect because the phone is pre-release, it’s not yet properly calibrated). Pretty much everything I was able to throw at this phone, it handled — except for, weirdly, YouTube in the browser. Again, this is pre-release hardware, so I assume that’ll be smoothed out by launch.

While I’m not the sort of idiot who would ever play music on my phone without headphones, I do often listen to podcasts at home, with my phone on the countertop beside me. The Mate 30 Pro has acoustic display tech, so that the sound comes out from behind the screen as well as the speaker on the bottom edge. Both in terms of quality and volume, I was surprised at how clear speech was on this thing, and how much it filled my echoey kitchen.

Huawei says that the Mate 30 Pro’s 4,500mAh battery is sturdy enough to last for 9.2 hours of “heavy” use. Certainly, I’ve struggled to really wipe out this phone in normal use, even while doing some intense camera and video work, and playing some games. In about six hours of shooting, I managed to knock just 22 percent off the battery, and I would expect it to run for at least a day and a half before needing a recharge in normal use. One issue I did have with performance was the unwanted bloatware. I hope that the retail version is scraped clean of some of this, but I doubt it will. And we’re still in the dark as to where the Mate 30 is going to be sold, anyway.

If you’re looking to upgrade from your existing Android phone, then you need to know that this isn’t the sort of device you can load from a backup and carry on as usual. The Mate 30 runs Android 10, draped in Huawei’s EMUI 10 skin, but it’s not really an Android phone as you might know it. Huawei is, presumably, unable to reference Google’s trademarks for advertising under the sanctions, and it’s not likely to draw attention to the issue. Instead of the Google services you’d expect, you’ll find Huawei’s alternative: the Huawei App Gallery.

In China, where Google Play is often blocked by the Great Firewall, the App Gallery is a reasonable replacement. And there’s an understanding that Android and Google aren’t one and the same, which is a very different situation to here in the west.

As of right now, plenty of apps you may expect to see are not available for download inside Huawei’s store, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which are now reportedly blocked from running on new Huawei devices, as well as Spotify, Twitter, and Netflix. And, naturally, if you use Gmail, YouTube or Google Maps on a regular basis, you’re going to have to use them inside your browser, or find a replacement.

There are two versions of Android that Google develops on a regular basis: Android, and Android Open Source Project. AOSP, as it’s better known, is the Android operating system, but with the hooks for Google’s Mobile Services (GMS) stripped out. AOSP is open-source and is designed to be used by anyone, for any purpose, including commercially.

In countries where Google is banned, like China, the majority of devices use Android AOSP with their own app stores. AOSP helps Google maintain dominance in the world’s devices, even if it isn’t directly working with those manufacturers. A cynic would think that AOSP was designed as a way for Google to avoid antitrust lawsuits, since it doesn’t have a monopoly over Android. But the recent fine exacted upon Google by the EU, specifically concerning its mobile services, has changed that.

Some apps will be available from Huawei’s App Gallery, and others from third-party stores that can access the phone. It’s also possible to sideload apps from other Android devices, but any that use Google’s APIs are likely to be broken.

During the event, CEO Richard Yu said that he Mate 30 would have an unlocked bootloader — enabling people to install Googleified versions of Android onto the device. Shortly afterward, Huawei walked back this claim, saying that it had no plans to do so, a confusing bit of messaging. That said, it’s not clear how many people would buy this device full price in the hope of installing an Android ROM on it to acquire basic functionality.

Huawei is launching a two-pronged attack to get over these issues, firstly by promising $1 billion in cash to help developers port their apps “over” from Android. The company has also made informal noises that, should the sanctions be lifted, it could add Google back to the Mate 30 in under a day. That’s little comfort to buyers who may be thinking about spending a thousand Euros on this phone on the promise of something in the future.

Huawei’s Mate 30 Pro reminds me of Nokia’s 808 PureView, a device with extraordinary imaging prowess, held back by its software. Nokia’s hulking phone was the first to offer 41-megapixel images, crunched down to a manageable size by pixel oversampling. The images it produced were brilliant, but it was a difficult device to sell, because of its OS. It ran Nokia’s moribund Symbian OS (for quasi-dumb phones) as the world was making the transition to Android.

It’s just hard it is to bootstrap a mobile ecosystem in the shadow of the twin giants of Android and iOS. webOS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Tizen and even MeeGo all tried to offer an alternative, all to varying degrees of failure. No amount of money thrown at developers can overcome the risk that comes with building software for a niche platform. On the other hand, the fact that these devices still run Android may mean it has a better chance than some.

The Mate 30 Pro, meanwhile, is a device with staggering imaging and video capabilities that is hamstrung by its poor, or nonexistent, app selection. Many things can change between now and the as-yet-unknown release date, but right now it has a lot of holes. Imagine walking into a store and being told that this device wouldn’t play videos from YouTube. Or being unable to download WhatsApp — unless Facebook decides to throw its weight behind the platform.

The Mate 30 Pro is another Huawei phone with pitch-perfect hardware, but if you rely on Google’s services (and if you use Android — you do) you should not buy this. At least, not until Huawei’s geopolitical fortunes improve.

Update 9/23/19 4:46AM ET: This articles has been updated with the correct CPU specs.

In terms of battery life, the Pro ships with a 4,500mAh battery which the company claims will last for 9.2 hours of “heavy” use, while the regular model will last for 8.2 hours on its 4,200mAh cell. In the past, Huawei devices have lasted a long time — these new devices will likely do the same. In terms of charging, you can pump 40W of electricity over a cable, or 27W via its SuperCharge wireless plates.

The Mate 30 harnesses the company’s new Kirin 990 5G system-on-chip, made with a 7-nanometer process that promises significant performance increases over the previous generation. The company says that 5G performance will be

Huawei is relying upon its partnership with Leica to burnish its imaging credentials, with four image sensors poking out of the back of the phone’s “Halo Ring” back. On the Pro, that includes a 40-megapixel “Cine Camera,” a 40-megapixel “SuperSensing” camera, and 8-megapixel Telephoto and a 3D, depth-sensing lens.

The banner feature among all those cameras may be a new ultra-slow motion mode on the Mate 30 Pro, which was demonstrated by filming a hummingbird where you can see every movement of the beating of its wings. It’s faster (well, slower?) than the competition, with a deliberate reference to the Galaxy Note 10. The company is clearly suggesting that the Mate 30 Pro is more of a camera than it is a smartphone, with low-light images and video recording that could be the equal of professional equipment. Although we should always take Huawei’s claims with a pinch of salt after it was found faking sample images from its phones with a DSLR just a few years ago.

On the vanilla Mate 30, the cameras are a little more modest, with a 16-megapixel, f/2.2 sensor adjoining a 40-megapixel f/1.8 wide-angle lens. The set is rounded out by an 8-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto with OIS.

Huawei is also making a big deal of the notch on the Mate 30 Pro, which is packing a quartet of sensors, starting with the 32-megapixel front-facing selfie camera. Next to that is a gesture sensor (much like LG’s G8), a 3D depth camera and an ambient light and proximity sensor. The Mate 30 has a far smaller notch, and has just the 24-megapixel selfie lens and the ambient light and proximity sensor. The loudspeaker for both devices is nestled underneath the device.

The Mate 30 series will come in four colors: Emerald Green, Black, Space Silver and Cosmic Purple. All of these have a matte metal gradient finish that is designed to avoid catching fingerprints and the handset sliding out of your greasy palm. There is also a Vegan Leather edition in a green and orange-tinted leatherette, and both models have the same ingress protection as the metal editions. In terms of sturdiness, the Mate 30 Pro is rated for IP68 for water and dust, while the Mate 30 is IP53.

Huawei hasn’t yet spoken about pricing or availability for either device, but it also was reticent to talk too much about the software that it’s running and with good reason. US sanctions mean that it can’t use Google’s services, including the Play Store, on this handset. Consequently, it may be a very hard sell for consumers who, as is common in the west, believe that Android and Google to be one and the same.

This breaking news story is developing, please refresh for more information.

According to Android Headlines, the Huawei Watch GT 2 will come in four color styles and two sizes: 42mm with a 1.2-inch AMOLED display, and 46mm with a 1.39-inch AMOLED display. It appears that the smaller version doesn’t come with a mic, which suggests no LTE either — perhaps this is intended to be a more entry-level device?

A new fitness tracker appears to be on the cards, although leaked details here are sparse. Last year’s Huawei event saw the Band 3 Pro and original Watch GT unveiled, so it’s likely to be an upgrade on that. Also on the agenda is a new TV, although again, Android Headlines hasn’t found much on this product, either. It does appear to mimic the Pro version of the Honor Vision TV, though, so it could well come with a pop-up camera, plus it appears to include a new sound bar, so we can probably expect improved audio.

Finally, it seems that there will be tablets on show at the event. Huawei revealed the MediaPad M6 in June with limited availability, so it seems likely the event will see the announcement of wider, global availability. It’s not unusual for products to leak before an event, of course, but it’s rare for an entire product line up to drop ahead of time. If this information is correct, all Huawei will have left to announce is the specs, costs and launch dates — at least that will leave ample time for questions about its ongoing struggles with the US.

The information comes from leaker Evan Blass via The Verge, and includes images of the four upcoming devices. There’s the top-end Mate 30 Pro, the regular Mate 30, the Mate 30 Lite and the Mate 30 Porsche Design. The Mate 30 Pro and the Mate 30 will reportedly be powered by the new Kirin 990 SoC chip, which has 5G support so it’s likely these will be 5G devices.

The most noticeable feature of the Mate 30 Pro is a huge rear camera module and the presence of an always-controversial notch. There’s also the “waterfall” display with a curved screen that continues from the front down the sides of the phone.

The Mate 30 Porsche Design will be a variant of the Pro that comes in a striking red or black color scheme with what looks like leather on the back.

As for the regular Mate 30, it looks similar to the Pro but it has a slimmer notch and doesn’t have the waterfall display. There’s no image of the back of the Mate 30 so we don’t yet known whether it will have the same distinctive camera module.

The Lite mid-range model is believed to use the Kirin 810 chip and looks rather different from the Mate and the Pro, with a punch-hole camera cutout at the front and curved glass at the back framing a square rear camera cutout.

Huawei will use Android for the Mate 30 range as it is open source software. However, the devices will ship without Google apps like Maps and YouTube due to the current US restrictions on the company. That also means the phones won’t have access to the Play Store, so many Android apps may be inaccessible on the devices.

We’ll have to wait until September 19th to learn about official specs and pricing.