While users of Android phones can access millions of apps via the Google Play Store, Huawei's app store does not offer some of the most popular Google apps that people outside of China rely on, which could hamper the Mate XT's appeal.
"Lack of Google still is a 'gaping hole' for mainstream international market especially those who will pay top dollar for a tri-fold hardware but which want to run Netflix or Google's Play Store or the latest cutting edge GenAI Google Gemini features," Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
Gemini is Google's artificial intelligence chatbot.