Can Google Still Work AFTER Updating to Huawei HarmonyOS?

Got a pleasant surprise yesterday as my HUAWEI Mate30Pro was being upgraded to HarmonyOS. As you might know, Huawei officially announced the HarmonyOS in China recently and has promised that their handsets (the more current ones) will be upgraded to it.

What I did not expect is that it automatically updated it without my intervention. Not sure why but I am all gamed for it. Check out the video below where I scrambled to document the process of the HUAWEI Mate30Pro being updated from Android 11 to Huawei HarmonyOS 2.0.

I have not really tried all the features but I have to say that it is smoother now. And It has a feature “Super Device” where I assume future Huawei devices can be detected and connected via Super Device (as shown in their demo recently).

To be truthful, my biggest worry during the upgrade is that it will wipe out the Google Play Store and anything related to it. When I had the Mate30Pro 2 years ago, I did load in Google Services to it, and it has been working well and with HarmonyOS, I thought that it will clear it away.

To my surprise, it did not and it is still working well after the update. I am still able to access Google Maps, Google Play Store, Gmail and etc without issues.

If you are interested in the details. Here are the Firmware version and changelog.

This is the changelog.

If all things go well, Huawei HarmonyOS will be the 3rd largest OS on mobile after Android and iOS. I like Huawei for the fact that their handsets are well-made and the battery life on each handset is amazing. So far, it has the best battery life in daily usage.