The news seems to be generally frightened on the prospect of “OMG, Huawei will have to make a phone without Google Services!”.
Which is actually funny: many here in the community love Open OS or strive towards LineageOS and other alternatives. They are investing a lot of time and effort into: getting a phone without Google Services.
If Huawei plays it right (which is not granted, sure), they can turn this ban into a feature: they could be the first major manufacturer delivering a phone that is purposely ready for alternative OSes. They could invest fairly minimal (compared to their size) resources into actively maintaining Lineage and AOSP, and actually sell the openness of their phones as a feature. Or simply ship Lineage as their operating system.
They certainly have enough buying power in their hands to make their suppliers support all the needed bits and pieces.
Or they go the other way, with a locked-down clone of Google Services, hoping to compete.
Aren’t they already on the way to their own OS?
I think I remember, they had a presentation of something to come.
They call it “HongMeng” or “_ARK OS”.
And it shall be on the market by the beginning of 2020 latest, if not autumn this year.
Though it seems to be a bit unclear, if that OS is to be meant for smartphones.
In one article they called it “the never ending story of 2020”.
As far as I know, the new OS shall be compatible to Android and all the apps shall be working with ARK as well.
Try some internet search with HongMeng or ARK OS to find various articles in your preferred language.
At least I would not put any hope in a solution to the problems with Google or Apple being provided by Huawei (or Samsung).
If anything, they are even more under pressure by their government.
Not, that I would not wish for the same as you, though.
I agree it could be an opportunity, probably not for FP as their OS will most probably be proprietary and adapted to their hardware, but still there will be one of the major vendors offering Google-free solutions, which sounds captivating at least.
But I’m much less optimistic: there are some apps that people want and that Google managed to chain up to their ecosystem, such as banking apps, token-secureid apps etc.
At least, it’s a manifest of how much android is not free and not good for people seeing freedom as priority.