U.S. government reportedly unhappy about Google’s relationship with Huawei [Update]

The U.S. is targeting Huawei again? Shocker.

Updated June 8, 2018: After being called out by Congress about its relationship with Huawei, a Google spokesperson responded with the following statement: “We look forward to answering these questions. Like many US companies, we have agreements with dozens of OEMs around the world, including Huawei. We do not provide special access to Google user data as part of these agreements, and our agreements include privacy and security protections for user data.”

Huawei has been in the United States’ crosshairs pretty much since the beginning of the year, resulting in a completely botched launch of its Mate 10 Pro flagship on U.S. carriers.

Now, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Congress is giving Google a hard time over its continued relationship with the Chinese company.

WSJ reports that Congress is unhappy with Google continuing to license the Android OS to Huawei and that:

Some members of Congress also plan to voice displeasure over Google’s continued partnership with Huawei in light of its more recent decision not to renew a Department of Defense contract, according to these people.

That “Department of Defense contract” is referencing Google’s decision to cease working on Project Maven with the Pentagon once its current contract expires in 2019.

In addition to using Android on phones and tablets, Google and Huawei furthered their relationship even more this January when Huawei announced it would start using Android Messages as its default texting app to help Google push forward in replacing SMS with RCS.

ZTE has also been receiving a lot of heat from the U.S. throughout the year, with things going as far to put ZTE out of business for a few weeks thanks to a Denial Order from the Commerce Department. A deal has reportedly been made between ZTE and the United States, but it’s unclear at this time if a similar agreement will be made with Huawei to ease tensions here, too.

These are all the Huawei/Honor phones coming out in 2018