At a recent trade show a Huawei exec indicated that there may be a way to enable its future smartphones to access Android apps despite Google being banned from working with it.

The goss comes from Android Authority, which attended the launch of the Huawei P30 Pro at IFA in Germany. At the launch the head of Huawei’s consumer business group Richard Yu apparently told reporters he has a cunning plan to get around the catastrophic consequences of not longer having google support for Android.

While Android itself is open source and anyone is free to install their own take on it, the Play Store and Google apps such as Gmail. Maps, etc are all licensed from Google and can’t be installed on a phone without that license. If and when the US stops suspending the sanctions that come with Huawei being put on its entity list, Google will be barred from entering into further licensing agreements with Huawei.

An Android phones without Google apps and the Play Store is not worth having. There are already signs of Huawei having to adapt to that eventuality, with the P30 Pro featuring the EMUI 10 user interface that is ‘based’ on Android 10. The extent to which it deviates from Android 10 to the detriment is unclear.

In reference to the imminent launch of the flagship Mate 30 smartphone, Yu said Huawei is working on a way of letting users install Google apps on the non-official version of Android. He even went so far as to say that the process would be quite easy for users, without going into details. Even if that’s true, however, with there being so little to choose between flagship Android smartphones when it comes to hardware specs, there would still be little incentive for punters to accept any user experience compromise, so even this hope may be forlorn.