During last week, Huawei hosted an event in London to attract new developers to its Huawei Mobile Services System (HMS), the tech giant’s substitute to Google’s Play Services, which cannot be used in their smartphones anymore because of the U.S. trade restrictions the company has been issued with.
First revealed in August 2019 at a developer conference in China, HMS was ‘relaunched’ with the HMS version 4.0 in December. The technology giant is looking to search for developers to launch their apps on Huawei’s own app store.
The company says that about 55,000 applications are currently accessible, all of which use the HMS Core, an API free to register and use, with the developer kits enabling almost a thousand APIs for creators to use.
The HMS mobile kits are created to be similar to the functions usually offered by Google‘s APIs on Android devices, with features such as location tracking, health, machine learning, purchasing, messaging, and so on.
Attracting Developers
Huawei’s AppGallery has about 400 million active users, and two of the most renowned apps are the Huawei Browser and the Huawei Assistant, with approximately 270 million and 180 million active users per month, respectively.
The company stated that it provides an interesting position for app developers for numerous reasons, the main being the fact that it creates and builds the whole development ecosystem, with HMS Core merging with Huawei cloud and the tech giant’s mobile devices to offer a ‘fully-connected ecosystem.’
However, with a GBP 20 million ($26 million) investment to attract developers to the new system, Huawei’s AppGallery is still rather empty of popular apps, with developers apparently preferring to build apps for the most part of Android devices, rather than majoring for a brand’s devices.
Huawei’s client success, as well as its forthcoming Huawei P40 series, will be mostly decided by whether the tech giant would be able to use Google’s services ever again, or not.
