Huawei is offering £20,000 to developers to port to AppGallery and HMS

Most of us are aware of the predicament that Huawei finds itself in at this present time. The Chinese company’s issues with the U.S. government are well-documented. Currently, the company’s newly-released smartphones do not come with Google Mobile Services, and all that comes with it: Gmail, YouTube, and so on. 

A potential solution could be HarmonyOS, Huawei’s self-developed operating system that has supposedly been in the works for some time now. But despite what top executives may say about the strengths of the platform, a huge factor in the viability of the platform is very much dependent on the selection of apps available for Huawei devices.

At a recent event in London, Huawei announced the launch of some developer-centric Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) Core Kits, and the embattled Chinese company also used the conference to remind attendees that it was still number two in the smartphone market. As part of a pitch to developers to port over Huawei’s proprietary AppGallery, the company shared that there has already been an encouraging number of developers who have signed up—55,000 apps have been reportedly signed up through HMS Core.

Upload to the Huawei AppGallery by the end of January, pocket £20,000

Huawei also offered developers in the UK and Irelend who upload their apps to the Huawei AppGallery by the end of January £20,000 (about RM106,121). That’s part of the £20 million being invested into the UK and Ireland development industry.

HMS 4.0 was announced in December, and there are 24 developer kits that cover a variety of different functions, ranging from GPS-tracking to machine learning—including facial detection tech, as well as AI-based text recognition and image-labelling. Huawei reportedly already has 400 million monthly active users on the AppGallery, with the company saying that the HMS Core will dovetail with Huawei Cloud and the company’s devices to form a connected ecosystem

Meanwhile, the company also touted the benefits of their 1+8+N strategy—with HarmonyOS at the centre—with 1 being smartphones, 8 being PCs/tablets/TVs/headphones, and N being Smart Home IoT devices, or cars.

The AppGallery reportedly had 180 billion downloads in 2019 alone, and the 50,000 apps are expected to increase in the near future. However, the numbers aren’t exactly worrying for the two behemoths of the “app gallery” space: Apple and Google. Both Apple and Google have millions of apps, although it’s worth noting that many of these apps are old apps that aren’t really downloaded or actively used with any amount of regularity anymore.

[ SOURCE ]