Source: Huawei sacked Honor US team, refused deal for Google's 2016 phones after carriers failed to stock Nexus 6P and learning of new Google-only branding deal
David Ruddock / Android Police :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 report is the origin point of a decade-long arc: Huawei's US consumer ambitions were already collapsing from within before any government action. Carriers declined to stock the Nexus 6P, Huawei learned of a Google-only branding arrangement for the next phone generation, refused the follow-on deal, and sacked the Honor US team — a voluntary retreat that predates the regulatory wall by years.
What followed in the related coverage reads as the forced version of the same exit: ZTE was pushed into exploring its own operating systems after the US sales ban, Google then cut Android and Play support for Huawei outright, joint work like the Huawei-branded speaker died with Trump's May 2019 ban, and only the divested Honor brand got Google apps back with its 50 series. The 2016 walk-away looks, in hindsight, like Huawei rehearsing the decoupling it would later have imposed on it.
First-order effects
- Huawei loses its US carrier channel and its Honor US operation in one move, while Google loses Huawei as a hardware partner for its 2016 phone lineup — both sides' US smartphone plans end here.
Second-order effects
- Having already written off the US market, Huawei enters the 2019 crisis less exposed than peers: when Google cuts Android and Play support, the damage lands on China-market momentum rather than a US retail footprint, and ZTE — still dependent on the channel Huawei abandoned — is the one forced to scramble for OS alternatives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Chinese OEMs converge on sovereign software stacks rather than betting on continued access to Google services — a split confirmed by Honor only recovering Google apps through divestment from Huawei, which prices independence from the Android ecosystem as the cost of staying inside Huawei.
The trend: US-China tech decoupling is pushing Chinese handset makers from carrier-dependent Android partnerships toward self-reliant software ecosystems, with Huawei's 2016 retreat foreshadowing the split.