Huawei says its AppGallery is now the world's third biggest app store

One of the more important tidbits at Huawei's Mate Xs' announcement is the company's plans for Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), Huawei's proprietary API package that provides Huawei mobile devices access to its many advanced apps and services, such as Huawei ID, Huawei Mobile Cloud, Huawei Themes, Huawei Video, Huawei Assistant and more. (It's Huawei's version of Google Mobile Services, if you will.)

In a nutshell, with the continued tensions between Huawei and the US and the uncertainty surrounding Android on Huawei devices, Huawei has reiterated its plans to strengthen its own ecosystem and reduce its reliance on others.

Sustained development and opening up of the HMS Core to developers is something that Huawei has vowed to do, and you can see the progress in the latest HMS Core 4.0, which now includes several new services for machine learning, QR code and barcode scanning and short-range communications - just to name a few.

Huawei has even gone as far as to budget US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) to entice developers to make apps for its own app store, Huawei AppGallery. Versus the 30 per cent that Google is taking for paid apps, Huawei is only taking a 15 per cent cut.

And speaking of AppGallery, Huawei now claims that it's 'one of the world's top three' app stores, which I take it to basically mean third, behind Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store.

According to Huawei, AppGallery currently serves 600 million Huawei device users in over 170 countries and regions.

In fact, in 2019, AppGallery had more than 400 million monthly active users around the world (mostly in China?), with number of app downloads for the whole year hitting an all-time high of 210 billion. To expand this reach, Huawei is planning to roll out localisation services in new markets.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.