In 2019, Huawei was added to the US entity list by President Donald Trump which effectively blacklisted American firms such as Google from working with it. This hamstrung both Huawei and Honor’s smartphone business in the West as they could not run the Google Play Store or other key Google services, such as Maps and Gmail. This inevitably led to some rickety smartphone launches, such as the Honor 20 in May 2019 which made no mention of what operating system it would be running.
Image credit: Jack Loughran
Last year, Honor separated from Huawei, allowing it to once again work with Google and other US firms. This year’s MWC in Barcelona is the firm’s first major in-person event since going it alone and it is taking the opportunity to showcase devices that are yet again compatible with Google...