Thinking of getting yourself the brilliant Huawei P40 Pro, the Huawei P40, the Honor 9A or the Honor 9X Pro ? They’re all brilliant (have a nose at our Honor 9X Pro review here), but they all lack the Google Mobile Services. No YouTube app, no Google Maps app, go Gmail app and no Google Play store.
For those that are prepared to try new things, you can fill nearly all the gaps by doing this. Without Google Play, the phones instead get an app store called “AppGallery”, but the experience and the app selection isn’t great. To address this, Honor and Huawei have added “Petal Search”, which grabs Android apps from various bits of the internet.
However, as I mentioned in my previous piece, customers aren’t always ready for this shift, and can feel a bit lost using an “AppGallery” which doesn’t have the stuff they expect.
This has all led Huawei to add a warning to anyone clicking the “Buy” button on their non-Google phones, which looks like this…
It appears on the Huawei P40 Pro and the Huawei P40 pages to warn customers not to expect any Google bits. It also states that you’ll need to use Petal Search to fill in the holes that are fairly prevalent in the AppGallery.
I feel for Huawei and Honor, I really do. This really isn’t what you want to be waving in front of people when they’ve just clicked the “Buy” button on your flagship phones.
Likewise, if you click “Buy” on the cheaper Honor 9A or the Honor 9X Pro phones, you’ll get a similar message, shown below. I can only guess that Honor and Huawei have been getting a fair few returns or questions, because you now need to agree and accept that you understand this before the order is processed.
