Okay so by now you've almost certainly seen the Google/Huawei headlines. Google suspended some of its business with Huawei a couple days ago, there was a scramble over whether existing Huawei phones would keep getting Play Store and security updates, then the Commerce Department turned around and issued a 90-day license so things wouldn't fall apart immediately. I'm not going to rehash all of that blow by blow, partly because it's changing by the hour and partly because I think everyone's staring at the wrong layer of the stack.
Today the story that actually stopped me mid-coffee was ARM. As in, ARM Holdings, the Cambridge company that doesn't make a single chip itself but licenses the designs that basically every phone processor on earth is built on top of. Reports came out today saying ARM told its staff to suspend "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements" with Huawei, citing US-origin technology baked into its designs. That's a much bigger deal than losing Gmail, and I don't think most people writing about this understand why.
Here's the thing about Huawei that gets glossed over in the "no more Google apps" panic: Huawei doesn't just buy chips off a shelf like most phone makers. Its chip division, HiSilicon, actually designs its own silicon (the Kirin chips in stuff like the Mate 20 Pro) and it does that using ARM's architecture licenses. If ARM really walks away, Huawei doesn't just lose an app store, it loses the ability to design its own next-generation processors. Qualcomm and MediaTek chips are swappable in theory. A whole custom chip design pipeline built on ARM IP is not something you replace by Friday.
And this is a British company, not an American one, which is the part that made me go back and reread the story twice. ARM is owned by SoftBank now, sure, but it's headquartered in Cambridge. The reasoning being reported is that some of ARM's technology has US origins, so it falls under the same export restrictions as the American components Google and the chipmakers are pulling back on. Which, fine, maybe that's technically how the rules work, but it says something uncomfortable about how much of the global tech supply chain runs through US law even when the company itself isn't American at all. I don't love how casually that gets treated as just obviously how things work.
I'll admit I've got a small personal stake in caring about ARM specifically, which is that I've got a drawer full of old Raspberry Pi boards from over the years, and it's one of maybe three companies whose name I actually recognize from the "who designed this chip" side of things rather than the "who sold me the phone" side. Most people, understandably, have never thought about ARM once in their life. It's the company that's everywhere and invisible at the same time, which I guess is sort of the point of a licensing business.
What I keep coming back to is how differently these two stories are being covered. The Google angle gets the "will my phone still work" treatment because that's the relatable consumer question, and fair enough, that's what most people actually care about today. But the ARM angle is the one that determines whether Huawei has a phone business worth talking about in two or three years, not two or three weeks. If HiSilicon can't design competitive chips anymore, no amount of sideloaded APKs and workaround app stores fixes that.
None of this is resolved as of me typing this out tonight. Panasonic put out a statement today too, walking back earlier reports that it was cutting Huawei off completely, saying supply from outside the US would continue as normal, which tells you how fast and messy the reporting has been getting. I'd be careful believing any single headline on this for the next week or two. The framework everyone's using, that this is a story about Android and app stores, is going to look pretty incomplete once people work through what the ARM piece actually means.