Only if you are in the US. For the rest of us the price will probably drop.

Yea but no updates for the rest of the world either. What you get with the phone is basically it, no more updates after that. Now that I think about it, the new phones won't probably have GApps in general, so no market store -> no apps (I'm sure there'll be a different market app, like Amazon or someone's, but let's get real, who wants that?)

This will find appeal among those that wish to minimise their interaction with Google.

Having a smartphone (access internet, email etc) with camera is appealing, contributing to large surveillance corporations like Google, Facebook etc is not.

This will be a tiny minority of potential users.

This company is facing trouble worldwide because of their likely involvement with Chinese spying. I don’t think this will find any takers among people who are privacy conscious.

Those who are privacy conscious prefer to be spied upon by TLAs and surveillance corporations?

To clarify I'm not in favour of one type or another, but it's unlikely China can have any influence over my life.

Wow I’ve been pondering exactly this. China has no influence over my life (yet) and I feel it’s more likely that my information could be used against me by the Five Eyes. Not now necessarily but who knows what the future holds for western politics, surveillance etc.

...and don't mind unwanted interaction with Baidu or whoever installs non-removable services there.

if they give me something like F-droid or their own market place which endorses FOSS in a better way than what Android originally promised, e.g. minus the Google / Spyware shit preinstalled, then I'd pre-order one now. There is a window of opportunity and massive momentum for this provided they play their cards right (wouldn't hold my breath ... though ZTE on the other hand has been doing not too bad in contributing and supporting FOSS in the past).

It'll be easy for them to ship UnGoogled Android because that's what Huawei (and other manufacturers) use on their phones in China. Demand, however, is another story...

I would buy an ungoogled android phone - in particular with those specs and price to value ratio.

If they are clever they make a version of the required services hosted in Europe and under European law. Many many people would buy that.

The last two chinese android phones I have had came with a chinese app store pre-installed anyway. Now, I didn't trust it enough to use it then, but with how google have been the last couple of years...

You don't get that many updates on most Android phones anyway.

As long as you can root it and put LineageOS on it we're good.

Unlikely as Huawei disabled Bootloader unlocking starting with the P30. See https://forum.xda-developers.com/huawei-p30-pro/help/huawei-... for example.

Without platform-level support from HiSilicon for the Kirin CPU you won't get that far with community-OS either. And as a wholly owned Huawei subsidiary, HiSilicon is also on that sanction list.

I could imagine they might suddenly become way more open source friendly...

That's a very good point. If they start making lineageOS-friendly phones because of this whole deal, my next one might be a Huawei .

Except they can't buy half the components they need to make the hardware.