My feeling is that this whole silliness will backfire spectacularly! Huawei will develop their own OS. It's hard but not impossible. Who cares if there's buy-in from the entire developer community...nowadays people don't use apps that much anyways. Apps are just another way of consumption. Most apps can probably be replaced with webviews with little lost of functionality. I don't know enough about the technical difficulties they'll have in developing a brand new os, but it's been done multiple times. In any case, this sux for all parties.
Let's be honest, if Huawei (sponsored by the Chinese government) creates their own open/shared OS together with other Chinese manufacturers, Chinese people will switch eventually.
If WeChat is ported to the new OS, other apps will soon follow. The result: a Chinese OS that's completely independent of American manufacturers.
It's also possible that this will cause Huawei and the Chinese government to pour funding into Chinese chip designs. Eventually, China will become less dependent on the US and the US will lose another point of influence.
Is this bad for Huawei in the short term? Of course. But is this hurting the Chinese economy in the long term? I don't think so.
If there is an app compatability layer (API parity) I'm sure most users won't notice the difference, and app developers wouldn't cry too hard about missing Google play services, provided there is an alternative.
My bet is Huawei will pick up a team or company (lineage team start packing your bags) to move forward with minimal risk. That or partner with a few other b-list manufacturers and create an alternative.
Hell even Google itself is trying to drop Android.
30% of smartphones sold in the EU in 2019Q1 were Huawei.
You can bet that no bank or whatever will abandon such a large fraction of the users of their app, but is already calling people to get the Huawei OS version of their app started.
Especially given that Huawei OS looks to be a fork of AOSP with the proprietary Google Services replaced with proprietary Huawei services. The developpers will just fork the existing app, using Android studio, and the same language!
Many people won't. Many other people couldn't care less about Snapchat or Instagram. That latter set of people almost certainly still constitute a large enough market to be worth addressing.
Lots of corporate structure alternatives could offer a way around that. Perhaps a French company would support that, after making a deal for a certain portion of those apps' European revenue?
There are web replacements for all of these, but people are choosing to use them in app form overwhelmingly. Maybe that will change, but it would be a pain to try a cell today that couldn't run all of these apps very well.
