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Huawei Mate 30 phones lose access to manually install Android apps

By Cookie Monster - on 6 Oct 2019, 10:55am

Huawei Mate 30 phones lose access to manually install Android apps

Note: This article was first published on 3 October 2019.

Huawei's recently announced Mate 30 phones can no longer sideload Google's Android apps. 

According to Bloomberg, several smartphone experts claim that the Mate 30 phones have lost access to manually download and install Android apps. This came shortly after security researcher John Wu revealed a method to sideload Android apps via a "backdoor" in the Huawei's operating system. 

“Although this “backdoor” requires user interaction to be enabled, the installer app, which is signed with a special certificate from Huawei, was granted privileges nowhere to be found on standard Android systems,” he wrote.

“The system framework in Huawei’s operating system has a “backdoor” that allows permitted apps to flag some user apps as system apps despite the fact that it does not actually exist on any read-only partitions,” Wu said.

The tool to enable the installation of Google apps and services on the Mate 30 series has also disappeared. It is believed that Google tweaked its SafetyNet anti-abuse check to block the tool and sideloading of apps. However, there is still another method to get Android apps onto the Mate 30 phones.

Source: Bloomberg via Reuters

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