It’s been a little over a month since news first broke of Google revoking Huawei’s Android license. The implications of the U.S. trade ban on Huawei are still playing out, but one of the first victims of the trade dispute was the Honor 20 Pro. The Honor 20 series was announced merely two days after the explosive Reuters report, and there was a lot of concern that Honor’s new smartphone launch would be in peril. On the surface, the launch seemed to go as planned, but we’ve noticed that Honor has been rather vague about the availability of the Honor 20 Pro. While the brand confirmed pricing for both the European and Indian markets, they failed to give release dates, only promising that the phone will be available “very soon.” There were rumors that the 20 Pro failed to receive certification to use Google Mobile Services (GMS), but it now appears that the smartphone has been certified to use Google Play.
Earlier today, Google’s list of Play Supported Devices (which lists all Certified Android devices) was updated to include the 20 Pro with the model name “YAL-L41,” the international model. The regular Honor 20, however, was added to this list on June 1st, 2019. Interestingly, the Honor 20 is also listed as the “Huawei Nova 5T” while the Honor 20 Pro is also called the “Huawei Nova 5T Pro.” Perhaps the phones will be sold under different names in certain markets.
Since May 18th, 2019, the only other Huawei or Honor device to have been certified to use Google Play has been the Huawei Y9 Prime 2019.
Note: It takes around a day for devices added to the “Google Play Supported Devices” list to show up in the Google Play Console’s Device Catalog.
In our review of the 20 Pro, we noted how Honor built an excellent budget flagship that was hard to recommend because of the uncertainty around its release and software support. Honor has pledged to update the Honor 20 series to Android Q, but the brand still hasn’t offered a release date for the 20 Pro. Now that the 20 Pro has seemingly received certification to use Google Play, we suspect that its release date won’t be too far off. We’ve reached out to Google to confirm whether the 20 Pro has become Android certified and to Honor to confirm the release date.
Note: Huawei/Honor have stopped providing official bootloader unlock codes for its devices. Therefore, the bootloaders of their devices cannot be unlocked, which means that users cannot root or install custom ROMs.
The post The Honor 20 Pro has been added to the list of Google Play Certified Devices appeared first on xda-developers.
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