Huawei is sending developers requests to publish on its app store

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Late last month, news that Google had revoked Huawei’s Android license 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. If the company wants to survive without Google, then they need to ensure that their smartphones have access to a flourishing app ecosystem. To that end, the company is continuing to send out requests to developers of popular Play Store applications to get them to publish their apps on EMUI‘s pre-installed AppGallery app store.

A trusted developer, who wished to remain anonymous, reached out to us this morning with an email they received from Huawei. The email 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.

There’s nothing surprising about Huawei sending this email to app developers from Google Play. We’ve received similar emails from Amazon requesting us to publish on the Amazon Appstore, so Huawei is far from alone in making these requests. Still, the timing of these requests is interesting given the recent U.S. trade restrictions on Huawei and a recent report from Bloomberg detailing Huawei’s app store strategy outside of China.