Hands-on with Huawei's new Mate 40 Pro: incredible cameras and powerful processors, but the app selection is atrocious and makes the handset hard to recommend
You know the score by now. Huawei currently makes Android phones that can't run Android apps, or at least the ones that I, and most people, want to use.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Mate 40 Pro is the third straight Huawei flagship to draw the same verdict: the Mate 30 Pro and the P40 Pro Plus both paired class-leading cameras and silicon with a Google-free software stack that reviewers called a deal breaker. What changed with the Mate 40 Pro is that Huawei no longer frames this as a transitional gap — it is the product's steady state.
The review lands as Huawei's US restrictions have hardened from a supply problem into a platform problem: the hardware keeps improving, but the app layer that Western buyers actually use is absent, which is why the same review template keeps repeating across three product cycles.
First-order effects
- Reviewers and retail channels in Google-services markets now have a consistent three-cycle track record to point to, making the Mate 40 Pro a non-starter for mainstream Western buyers despite flagship cameras and processors.
- Huawei's addressable audience for the Mate 40 Pro effectively narrows to markets where Google's app suite is not the default — pushing the launch's commercial weight toward China.
Second-order effects
- The missing-apps penalty forces Huawei to compete on camera and chip claims rather than ecosystem, accelerating its push to build its own software layer — the HarmonyOS direction in the related coverage — to close the gap on its own terms.
- Rivals with full Google Mobile Services (Samsung, and Google itself) get a durable differentiator in the flagship tier without shipping better hardware: the app catalog becomes the selling point.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone market structurally bifurcates into a Google-centric Android ecosystem and a Huawei-built alternative, with Huawei's growth concentrated in China — where related coverage shows its shipments growing alongside Apple — while Western flagship share erodes.
- Huawei's parallel effort to rebuild its chip supply after being cut off from advanced US chips suggests the company is treating full-stack independence — silicon, OS, and apps — as the only exit from the restrictions, a template other sanctioned firms may follow.
The trend: Sanctions are pushing Huawei from a Google-dependent Android vendor toward a vertically independent, China-anchored ecosystem, with each flagship release marking another step in that decoupling.