Facebook suspends pre-installs of its apps on new Huawei phones in light of trade ban

UPDATE: Huawei’s has responded to the matter with this statement: “Facebook is a third-party application, and can be installed and used without any issue on HUAWEI devices“; ensuring that current and new users are still able to use the app as mentioned in the article below.

Things seem to worsen for Chinese phone manufacturing giants Huawei following their blacklisting by President Trump in the trade ban; Reuters report that Facebook is now suspending pre-installs on upcoming Huawei phones as the social media company obey the newly-imposed law.

Moving forward, Huawei will no longer be able to pre-install not just Facebook, but WhatsApp and Instagram as well, since the latter two are owned by Facebook Inc. Current users will still be able to continue using the apps, and new users can still download them after they get the phone; but not from Google Play Store like usual, since Google have also cut ties with the Chinese company.

If anything, this is more of a statement as to where these big name American companies stand in the matter – folks such as Google, Qualcomm, Intel, ARM and now Facebook have chosen to follow the law set by their President; and it seems now that Huawei are on a downward spiral.

With Huawei increasingly likely to use their own HongMeng OS in their upcoming phones, it will be interesting to see the kind of names they can pull to their side, especially since Google and Facebook have opted out already – that means HongMeng won’t even get Gmail, Maps, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more.