Now get all the official Google apps, including the Play Store, on the new Huawei phones with EMUI 12 or even EMUI 13 through the GBox app. If you do not know, Huawei smartphones were at some point a very fierce competitor to other OEMs, and since the start of the US ban on Chinese companies, the company began losing its large market share at that time, almost three years ago in 2019.

In fact, the company did not stop at this point, and fought hard through this crisis by launching AppGallery , which is supposed to be a competitor to the Play Store, which is a really good store if you ask me, and even created a complete operating system called HarmonyOS so they can get out of the mantle of Google permanently.

But the problem here is that as users of Android we have become accustomed to using the phone in a certain way with some necessary tools, all of which happened to be developed by Google. These tools include but are not limited to important apps such as YouTube, Maps, Gmail, apps that also require the presence of Google services or “GMS” such as Uber.

Therefore, with the distinction of the Chinese company’s phones in terms of internal hardware, wonderful design, and even the low price, so that it can compensate its users for the absence of these services, the user who buys a phone from Huawei always searches for a way to obtain the usual services on his new phone.

Over the past years, many methods and apps have appeared, such as GSpace, Chat Partner, and another method via Dual Space. While these methods may still work today, there is a new way to get Google services, which is by using an app called GBox.

What is GBox?

GBox “abbreviation for Google Box” is a free app that allows userس to install and “run” official Google Apps such as: Play Store, Gmail, and also YouTube, and some other. This is other than downloading these apps as apk files and installing them directly on your phone from Huawei, which is unfortunately will not work because these apps require the so-called GMS package or official Google services on your device.

And here appears the role of the GBox, which creates a suitable environment to run these apps so that it deceives the Play tore that these apps are used on a different phone, not from Huawei, and the result here is that you can log in to your Google accounts as usual.

GBox Download

Installation steps and how to use

1. From the previous links, download the app on your Huawei phone and install it.
2. Allow access to the permissions it needs.
   
3. From the app’s main menu, open Play Store.
4. Now sign in with your Google account.
   
5. Here you will see a notice from the app that it has “tricked” Google into thinking your phone is from Xiaomi, not Huawei.
   
6. Now try searching for any app from Google, let’s say Google Photos and install it.
   
7. Once the download is finished, a notification will appear below to add this app to your home screen, tap Add.
   
8. Finally, you will find that the new app is now within the contents of your GBox apps.

Once installed and running, you will notice that GBox suggests you to download some necessary Google apps with it. But from our experience, what we only downloaded through it is the Play Store, and then through the Android Store itself we downloaded all the apps that we wanted to try later.

Once you download any app from the Play Store, you will have the option to place a shortcut to it on the main phone screen, meaning that you will not need to run GBox every time you want to launch an app from Google – but you should know that it will work in background constantly, which means that you may notice more battery drain than usual, especially since the phone asks you to “not put it” in the phone’s power optimization, and I strongly advise you to agree to this request!

And to prevent distraction, any app that you have downloaded via GBox will have its own icon in the lower left pane showing small green icon.

If you want to delete an app that you have downloaded, simply open GBox, on the home page long press on the app you want to remove, and select Delete .

Official Google Apps on EMUI 12 & 13!

As for the performance, all of which were tested above on the Huawei Mate 50 Pro, we did not encounter any problem, suspension or slowness in any way, because it is constantly running in the background. All we needed to do here was sign in to a Google account within the Play Store app, which automatically synced the same account across all other Google apps as usual. YouTube was working as it should, plus Google Maps was able to get the phone’s current location very accurately and without errors.

The only issue we had here was with the Gmail app which was “not receiving” new mail quickly and was sometimes delayed, plus it didn’t show any notifications when new mail came in. We also had a problem trying to use Google Messages as the default messaging app because EMUI 13 itself did not recognize it since it was running inside a GBox environment and not as a normal app installed on the phone. Other than that, we had no problem getting it to work.

In fact, as a Huawei user, I’m really enjoying using the Google Box app right now. The issues I mentioned earlier are to be expected given that this is just a new way to get around Huawei phones not running official Google apps normally, but I’m honestly glad that I was able to run all my important apps on EMUI without having to go through complicated steps like the previous methods.