You can’t get the Google Photos app on the Huawei P40 Pro, or even the Mate 30 Pro. But you can upload photos. How does that work?
Google and Huawei aren’t the best of friends at the moment, and that’s more of a matter for public record. Thanks to the US decision to prevent Huawei from working with American companies, Google has had to distance itself and can’t work with Huawei.
It’s a bit of a shame, and something that has led to a rather complex and laboured app process on its new phones, including last year’s Huawei Mate 30 Pro and this year’s recently reviewed Huawei P40 Pro. In fact, it will affect any Huawei phone launched past May 2019, which surely includes more than just the two major flagships.
Huawei devices released before May 2019 aren’t affected, such as the P30 Pro, and can keep using Google’s apps and services the way they initially had, but those new devices are less fortunate. No support from Google means no Google Photos officially on those devices, and no apps to make them work.
But you can make Google Photos work on these phones because apps aren’t the only method.
How do you make Google Photos work on the P40 Pro or Mate 30 Pro?
To make Google Photos work on devices that don’t support the app or services connection, you have to turn to something the services can work on.
Remember that the apps didn’t always exist, and services like Photos had to be usable before this.
So how did they work? The web. And that’s exactly how you can make them work for you.
Google Photos can be used by logging in on your Huawei web browser, and will upload photos and files to them in much the same way.
Unlike the app, there is no way to have these automatically upload in the background, so that’s one feature you won’t gain. But if you’re looking to integrate that great camera on either the Mate 30 Pro or the P40 Pro with your Google Photos library, you can this way, and don’t have to be disconnected at all.
Google Drive, however, doesn’t work this way, and logging in via the Huawei web browser will only give you a way of exploring your files, not uploading. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like you can use the web on Huawei’s phones to backup all the files, though Google Photos is flexible enough that you might be able to get what you need simply by uploading images.
