Sideloading Huawei’s P40 Pro Plus turns it into a world-beating phone
If a smartphone’s worth is dictated by its camera, then the Huawei P40 Pro Plus is the best phone you can buy right now – except you probably won’t. What gives?
Since partnering with Leica in 2016, Huawei’s smartphone cameras have been amongst the best available. Scour the web for P40 Pro Plus reviews though, and the scores are generally around 3.5/5 or 7/10. The P40 Pro Plus is an exemplary smartphone, though its scores were likely docked by half a point or so for its bold price tag of £1,299. That said, it introduces world-first camera tech to the market: a true 10x zoom equivalent telephoto camera. Putting into context just how good that camera is, I recently reviewed the Sony ZV-1, a £699 premium compact stills camera, and when taking handheld pictures the P40 Pro Plus outperformed it in both dark scenes and in max-zoom detail. That’s a huge deal.
Why then are Huawei phones like the P40 Pro Plus being panned by tech writers? It comes down to one key issue: the trade war. In March 2019, Huawei was blacklisted from working with Google, or any US company for that matter. While Huawei has been able to release Android phones, it hasn’t been able to load them up with Google Mobile Services (GMS), including the Google Play Store, Gmail or YouTube.
In 2019, a defiant Huawei suggested its own Harmony OS would be a true rival to Android – but that wasn’t to be. Huawei also once shirked associations with third-party app stores early-on, focusing exclusively on its own AppGallery. Now, however, it’s preloading its phones with Petal Search. This is a Huawei-made, third-party app store search tool, which scours the sources Huawei once shied away from, like APK Pure, for apps missing from the AppGallery. Petal Search opens up easy access to big hitters like BBC iPlayer and Netflix for Huawei phones, and the result is a helpful band-aid solution that manages app installs and updates – but doesn’t fix the missing Google ones
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