Last month, Google blacklisted Huawei from doing business with American companies and as a result, Google was forced to revoked Huawei’s Android license, This shook the tech community. Since then, we’ve seen hardware suppliers, chip designers, standards organizations, and other companies pull out of deals with Huawei. Huawei’s growing pains have forced the company to speed up development on its Android OS and Play Store alternative.
Recent reports from a number of developers indicate that Huawei has been reaching out to developers via mail. The mail was an invitation to join AppGallery, an app store that the company says has “270 million monthly active users” on over “350m phones,” about half of which are sold outside of China. The email promises that developers will be provided with “full support” to help them publish their app on AppGallery, but it’s unclear exactly what kind of support will be provided to developers. Lastly, the email mentions a free invitation to a developer community of over “560k”, though we don’t know how active this community really is.
Subject: [OFFICIAL] Invitation to join Huawei AppGallery
Cher XXX team,
In the last 2 years, Huawei shipped over 350M phones, about half of them in western markets.
All Huawei phones have our official AppStore “AppGallery” preloaded globally, with 270 million monthly active users.
We realized that your great Android App XXX is not yet published in our AppGallery.
In order to guarantee a smooth usage of your App for our users, Huawei is committed to provide you with full support, to help you publish your App into AppGallery.
We would therefore like to invite you to join our 560k developers community for free, in our Huawei Developer portal.
If there is anyone that can get back up from a set back such as this, then Huawei, as big as they are, are best placed. It should be noted that a few weeks ago, Huawei was said to be in talks with Aptoide, yet another Google Play Store alternative in a bid to see how to run a fork of Android without Google services.
