Huawei Mate 9: issues installing some apps from Google Play Store

The day finally came. I bought a Chinese-branded phone.  And. It. Is. AWESOME.  6GB RAM, 128GB internal storage.  It’s enough to make a person drool.

So what’s my first step on getting my new phone set up?  Installing my apps, of course!  That’s where my great plan hit a snag.  I noticed that I could not install some apps which is had no issues with before.

We’ll use The Blockheads as an example.  It’s a neat little 2D survival game similar to Minecraft.  It would start to download but stop about 50MB or so in.  I’ve got an unbelievable amount of free space, so I knew that wasn’t the issue.  So, what gives?

From researching it online, I discovered that Android’s newer permissions model could cause issues for the Play Store if it has not been granted Storage access.

Why wouldn’t all installs fail if it didn’t have storage access?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  The Play Store doesn’t need storage access for most smaller apps.  It’s the larger ones which often need to download ancillary files which will silently crash the store.

If you’ve run into the same issue, here’s what you need to do:

1. Head to Settings
   
2. Tap on Permissions
   
3. Locate and tap on the entry for Google Play Store
4. Enable the Storage permission
   
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for the Google Play Services entry to make sure it has the permission as well
   

Now I’d reboot to be sure it’s applied, then give it another try.  After doing this I was able to install anything with no more Play Store crashes.

Now I just need to figure out how to transfer my previous phone’s Blockheads world to my new, non-rooted phone…