The U.S. government's ban has been very damaging to Huawei. Since the executive order by the Trump administration prohibits companies in the U.S. from supplying anything to buying anything from the Chinese company, many software and hardware giants, as well as telecom operators, have been forced to cut ties with the company. Arguably, the biggest blow to Huawei is being stripped off of its license to use the commercial version of Android. Now, Facebook is reportedly culling partnership with the Chinese company and will no longer allow its apps being pre-installed on Huawei and Honor devices.

Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram come pre-installed on the majority of smartphones from Huawei and Honor. But, with this decision from Facebook, Huawei will no longer be able to provide these apps to users right out-of-the-box. Just to clarify, these apps will continue to work perfectly on Huawei or Honor devices.

While the future smartphones from the company will no longer come with these apps pre-installed, users will still have the ability to download Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp onto their smartphones through the Google Play Store. While Huawei devices made after August 19th may even lose access to Google's apps and services including the Play Store, users can find these apps via Huawei's own app store – AppGallery.

We don't see Facebook's apps not being readily available on Huawei and Honor smartphones as a bad thing. At XDA, we've always been advocates of having no bloatware and have also tried to help the community in the past to get rid of the distressing amount of pre-installed junk in the previous version of EMUI. With the iterations in EMUI, Huawei has toned down on this bulldoze but a few apps like those for Twitter and Booking.com still come pre-installed alongside Facebook's apps. We're not sure if these companies also plan to withdraw support under fire from the U.S. government but things should become clearer in the coming months.

Source: Reuters

Update: Huawei states the obvious

Taking note of the news about Facebook withdrawing its partnership following the ongoing fiasco, Huawei has responded by saying that Facebook's apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger can be installed on any smartphone. It tried to play safe and did not offer any explanation which may reason the step from Facebook. While we're glad the smartphones will come with less bloatware, here's the official statement:

"Facebook is a third-party application and can be installed and used without any issue on Huawei devices."