Huawei - are they a threat?

In the tech world, there were misgivings about Huawei well before Trump became president. It was an open secret that there were suspicions about their networking equipment containing insidious hardware implants, backdoors or hidden ports.

In 2013 the ex-CIA boss Michael Hayden alleged that Huawei has shared “intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems” with the Chinese state.

Commentators are suggesting this is a tool in the trade war, and they may be right, but this does not mean the suspicions were without foundation.

However, the latest move by Google is part of the trade war, restricting Huawei’s access to the Android operating system (OS) the is widely used mobile software that powers Huawei phones and tablets. Huawei could develop its own OS, of course, as the code behind Android is open source, but denying access to well proven Google apps & maps could be a game changer.