Life without Google Mobile Services

Huawei P40 Pro is actually banned from using is Google Mobile Services (GMS), the suite of software and APIs licensed by other Android OEMs. It’s not just the apps themselves, but often the cloud services that power them. For example, Grab uses GMS to determine your location and for its mapping data.

So, without GMS, how does it affect the consumers ?

Basically, with GMS, your previous backups stored on your Google account cannot be restored to the P40 Pro. Thus you will probably have to manually install all the apps manually.

Problem arises as the phone does not come with Google Play services. Without Google Play Store, you can’t download the apps you are used to.

Huawei phone now comes with App Gallery which serves a similar function as Google Play Store. You can find most of the commonly used apps.

Well, this can be resolved with the help of Peta Search which comes with the phone. It basically searches different stores and allow you to download the popular APKs including banking apps, news apps.

Secondly, you can install Amazon Store and use that as your application store.

If none of the apps appear on both stores, you might want to do a Bing or Google search for the corresponding APK from sources like apksure.com etc.

Peta search
Peta Search
Amazon Store

As the Google maps is part of GMS and is not available on the P40 Pro, you would experience issues with apps that requires Google Maps. These include the popular Network cell info lite app that we commonly used for testing networks.

With no Google apps, you can still install the Google applications through the URL. e.g. m.youtube.com, m.gmail.com. If you intend to upload your photos to Google Cloud, you can still do that by accessing photos.google.com

Basically, you can survive without GMS, it is just a bit cumbersome and getting used to it.

Alternatively, if you really insist of Google Mobile Services, there are many guides on youtube and web that teaches you how to install it. By the time you read this article, the old guides might have already been rendered useless as patches could have been introduced to prevent GMS from being installed illegally on the phone.

By Harry