Huawei debuts Mate Xs with no Play Store access, 8-inch unfolded and 6.6-inch folded display, Kirin 990 5G chipset, and 8GB RAM, coming later in 2020 for €2,499
Huawei has officially unveiled its second-generation Mate Xs foldable and MatePad Pro 5G tablet at a behind closed doors launch event in Barcelona, Spain.
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after the original $2,600 Mate X was announced at MWC 2019, Huawei is back in Barcelona — this time behind closed doors rather than on the main stage — with the Mate Xs at €2,499 and the Play Store-free MatePad Pro 5G alongside it. The missing Google apps are the story within the story: both devices ship into a market where Huawei has been cut off from Google Mobile Services.
The lineage matters for reading the price. The Mate Xs sits between the Mate X2 that followed in 2021 and the original, and the line eventually runs to the globally launched tri-foldable Mate XT — evidence that Huawei kept investing in foldables even as its software access narrowed.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the €2,499 Mate Xs get the hardware upgrade — 8-inch unfolded display, Kirin 990 5G, 8GB RAM — but no Play Store, meaning apps must come through Huawei's own channels on day one.
- Huawei is simultaneously pushing the same no-Google formula at a mass price point with the €549 MatePad Pro 5G, betting its tablet and phone ecosystems can stand together rather than alone.
Second-order effects
- App developers face a forced choice: port to Huawei's distribution or concede the segment, since every Play Store-free device Huawei ships raises the cost of ignoring its platform.
- Samsung and other foldable rivals can compete on software completeness — full Google services — while Huawei competes purely on hardware form factor, splitting the premium foldable market along ecosystem lines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Huawei's trajectory points toward a fully decoupled stack: the later Kirin 9000S-powered devices and the shift toward domestically sourced components suggest the company treats each Play Store-free flagship as infrastructure for a parallel mobile ecosystem.
- For the industry, sustained premium pricing without Google services tests whether hardware differentiation alone can sustain a third smartphone ecosystem outside iOS and Android-with-Google — the question every subsequent Huawei foldable quietly answers.
The trend: Huawei is converting sanctions-driven isolation into a deliberate strategy of Google-free premium hardware, using its foldable line as the annual proof point that the parallel ecosystem still advances.