Huawei Mate 30 Pro: we tested 40 applications, not all of them work

Lack of features 40 popular apps AppGallery Does it work?Reviews Available for €674

While it is possible to download APK files to install applications on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, not all of them will work properly and some will not even be able to launch. We tested forty of the most popular on Android.

This week, Huawei announced the arrival in France of its latest high-end smartphone, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. If its launch is scheduled for Monday, December 9, it is however subject to a major problem: the absence of Google Play services.

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Functions that are missing for some applications

In other words, the smartphone does not take advantage of classic Google applications such as Gmail, Google Maps or Google Messages, but Google's application store, the Play Store, is not installed either. Above all, this partly penalizes other applications offered by third-party developers. Indeed, many of them have decided to use certain APIs offered by Google within Google Play services to add mapping, identification, payment or localization functions to their own applications.

It is therefore theoretically possible to install an application on an alternative store or directly using an APK file. However, there is no indication that it will work properly on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro or on future smartphones from Huawei and Honor.

A selection of 40 of the most popular apps

In order to find out which applications could work on the latest Huawei smartphone, we have therefore chosen 40 of the most popular on Android. These can be social networks like Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter, meal delivery apps like Deliveroo or Uber Eats, games like Pokémon Go or Call of Duty Mobile, music streaming services like Spotify or Deezer, or messaging tools like Discord, Slack or Whatsapp. We also chose three Google applications: Google Maps, YouTube or Google Translate. Unlike Gmail or Play Music, these apps don't need user identification to work, at least in theory.

Five applications offered in the AppGallery out of the 40 selected

For each of these apps, we first looked to see if it was available in the AppGallery, Huawei's app store. We looked in the French version of the store, which is more accessible, although it is possible to do your research by simply switching to the Chinese version, which is more complete.

And as much to say that the fishing was very meager with only five applications offered out of the 40: the Amazon store, the Epic Games installer, MX Player, Viber and VLC. Obviously, these applications being offered voluntarily by the developers on the Huawei store, they work without problem with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, since they use Huawei Mobile Services instead of Google Mobile Services.

Out of 40 apps, more than a quarter don't work

For the other 35 apps, we used the alternative Aptoide store. Downloading applications from another application – rather than from a third-party site for example – has the advantage of having updates offered automatically, without having to do them manually. However, it should be noted that developers have less control in this way and applications may present more security risks.

On Aptoide, we were able to find them all. However, this does not mean that all of them are compatible with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. So we tested them one by one to find out which could work or not.

In concrete terms, we will therefore point out that applications from Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon have no trouble doing without Google APIs and therefore work perfectly without them. For most applications, however, you will have to find a way to identify yourself other than by the Google button, because this one simply does not work. And in the absence of a Huawei ID, the easiest recourse will often be the Facebook button.

It should also be noted that the in-app purchase, when it is intended to use the Google Play Store, is often ineffective. An alternative may therefore be to download the application from the Amazon store, if it is offered there, since payment by the e-commerce platform is not blocked. Finally, for some applications, there is no alternative and, unless you tweak the system to install Google Play services – we will come back to this later this week – you will simply not be able to use them.

Obviously, this list is not exhaustive and only represents a tiny quantity of the applications used by owners of Android smartphones. If you want to know if other applications are operational on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, do not hesitate to let us know in the comments, and we will try to try them.

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