In connection with yesterday’s launch of its Mate 40 smartphone series, Huawei also released new applications that develop the Huawei Mobile Serives ecosystem, perhaps the most significant of which is the navigation application Petal Maps.

As a result of the US-China trade war, Huawei has not been able to use Google services (GMS, Google Mobile Services) on its new phones, including the US giant’s own Google Play app store and interfaces used by certain Android applications, as well as standard Google applications, including the Google Maps application. The Huawei Petal Maps app is coming to fill the gap left by Google Maps. Previously, only Here WeGo and TomTom Go Navigation map applications have been available for Huawei phones from the AppGallery

. According to Huawei, Petal Maps provides ways to leverage other applications in the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) ecosystem seamlessly with map features. In practice, this is likely to mean that applications can use Petal Maps quite naturally to meet their own map needs in the same way as Google Maps in the GMS ecosystem.

Petal Maps itself includes quite a few modern basic features in terms of its navigation and map features. In addition to position display and navigation, it supports both 2D and 3D views, restaurant and cabinet opening hours, and real-time traffic information. Public transit timetables Petal Maps can show 129 for a large city, but so far an exact list of what these big cities are is not available. The map application can also take advantage of P 40, Mate 30 and Mate 40 series uses the front camera gesture control, which allows you to control the map application without touching the phone screen itself.

For navigation, Petal Maps uses image recognition algorithms called Super GNS, which, according to Huawei, make it possible to search for the fastest and least congested routes. As expected, navigation also supports voice announcements, but so far the languages ​​spoken are only available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Mandarin. Finland is therefore not yet available in the selection, at least not yet.

On the app’s website, the Chinese manufacturer also emphasizes its security and privacy. Huawei advertises that the application strictly adheres to local security and privacy policies, laws and regulations in all countries where it is available.

In addition to the map application, Huawei launched Petal Search, a replacement for Google search engines, which is available immediately