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Even if they develop a mobile OS, will it be the quality and usefulness of Google services? Android is just linux + google services. Without those, it's hard to make the sell to western audiences, at least.

Google Maps is a masterpiece of engineering and it's hard to imagine that Huawei will be able to compete, near term. If I'm reading the situation right, this might mean the end of Huawei in the western phone market unless something changes.

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You can’t really use Google Maps in China. Even over VPN it’s outdated and often displays the wrong location due to the GPS scrambling that the government enforces on maps.

Baidu Maps is very good though, I would even say on par with Google Maps and better in some areas. It does however have more obvious ads which is annoying.

Huawei's market is international as well as domestic. Western users are used to Google services. So while they can work around the issue for Chinese users, they basically lose the western market. Who wants Android without the spectrum Google-like services?

Which is a huge deal for Huawei, imo.

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