Huawei has been building its own app store since 2018
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Huawei has been building its own app store since 2018
Huawei is not only developing its own mobile OS to replace Android and Windows, it is also building its own app store as an alternative to the Google Play Store.
According to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg and five sources who have spoken with the company, Huawei started pitching developers to tailor their existing Android apps for its App Gallery store in early 2018.
The Chinese company focused its homegrown app store strategy on Europe as it had more than 20% of the smartphone market in 22 countries there. Huawei held talks with European telcos sometime this year about installing App Gallery on new phones. In addition, it proposed splitting revenue from App Gallery by giving a "very significant" portion to partners.
To encourage developers to build apps for App Gallery, Huawei promised marketing support and "China app store exposure". It also provided a simple tool for developers to tweak the software they wrote for the Google Play Store to work on App Gallery. Moreover, Huawei shared with potential partners that the App Gallery would have 50 million users by the end of 2018.
Huawei's App Gallery now faces a grim future. Although the U.S Commerce Department granted a temporary license to Huawei for 90 days to continue providing Android updates, Google and other U.S tech companies are banned from working with Huawei in new businesses. With future Huawei phones having no access to Google services and other popular apps that European users typically rely on, Huawei's smartphone expansion efforts would be hampered.
