Some Huawei P30 Pro units are failing SafetyNet, but it’s probably temporary

Ben Schoon | Oct 4 2019 - 8:31 am PT

The Huawei drama continues. This week, some Huawei P30 Pro users are reporting that SafetyNet tests are failing on their devices, breaking many apps including Netflix and Google Pay, and Huawei has confirmed the issue.

What is SafetyNet? The set of APIs and services is used to safeguard apps that need extra security. Some popular apps that take advantage of it include Google Pay and also Netflix. If a device isn’t certified by Google, it will fail SafetyNet tests and, by extension, those apps will stop working just like they did on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro recently.

Android Authority confirmed with Huawei that some P30 Pro users are seeing failed SafetyNet checks. The company says that EMUI 10 beta users may see the standard broken with the latest platform update, but says that Google could be to blame. However, the issue seems to be affecting a small number of users on older versions of the platform.

Paul O’ Brien showed on Twitter that his “unmodified” P30 Pro was not passing a SafetyNet test and further confirmed that apps like Google Pay were broken as a result. He did say, however, that “flashing Hisuite” fixed the problem. Huawei says this shouldn’t be happening.

More than likely, this is just a temporary issue so there’s no need to panic that Huawei’s older devices are suddenly losing access to Google’s services. Huawei said in a statement that EMUI 10 has already been certified by Google for when it rolls out to all users.

Usually for the sake of beta testing, Google allows vendors’ beta OS version on specific models to appear and behave as certified version/device even if this version/device combination is still in the process of being certified.

After some investigation, we found our global EMUI 10 beta version released on P30 and P30 pro in early August does not appear and behave as certified device anymore where they should be, as explained above.

EMUI10 on P30/P30 pro had been certified recently and the certified version will be available to global users in the future. In the meantime, we’re reaching out to Google to identify the cause of this issue for the current beta users and try to solve it as soon as possible.