The effects of the United States’ Huawei ban continue to grow, with the Chinese hardware company now barred from being a member of the SD Association (the trade group that agrees upon standardized specs for SD and microSD cards).
In other words, Huawei is no longer allowed to put official SD or microSD card support in its future phones or laptops, via 9to5Google.
The SD Association has confirmed to Android Authority that Huawei’s removal from the group was due to Trump’s executive order, making it the the latest blow to the besieged Chinese company as the result of that ban.
MicroSD cards and SD cards will continue to work on existing Huawei hardware, but being barred from the SD Association means that Huawei won’t be able to use the standards on future products.
The SD Association is also by no means the first to cut ties: Google, ARM, Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom are also among the companies that have stopped working with Huawei due to the ban.
The Wi-Fi Alliance (which sets Wi-Fi standards across the industry) has also “temporarily restricted” Huawei’s membership due to the US ban, and Huawei has also voluntarily left JEDEC (a semiconductor standards group best known for defining RAM specifications) over the issues with the US as well, according to a report from Nikkei Asian Review.
All this could severely hamper Huawei’s ability to produce hardware at all, much less compete in the US technology market.
Losing SD cards may not be the biggest issue for the company right now. Like with Android and Windows (which Huawei is already developing replacement OSes for) Huawei has prepared for an microSD card outage too: the company has its own, proprietary Nano Memory Cards that are physically smaller than microSD cards and which have replaced the more universal standard entirely on its newer devices.
