Huawei Says Its AppGallery Is Now World's Third Largest App Store

In a bid to lure developers onto its platform, Huawei on Monday claimed that its indigenous mobile app ecosystem, AppGallery is the third-largest ecosystem in the world. AppGallery is similar to Google's Google Play and Apple's App Store that are used by Android and iOS users to download from, respectively. The announcement was made by Huawei Consumer Business Group at an event in Barcelona, where the company also launched its new foldable smartphone, Mate Xs that does not come with Google Play or Google Mobile Services.

The latest announcement comes as Huawei faces flak from the US government who last year banned US companies from doing business with the Chinese tech giant. In 2019, Alphabet's Google suspended business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware, software, and technical services except those publicly available via open source licensing.

Speaking about the AppGallery, Huawei claimed it is serving over 600 million Huawei device users in over 170 countries/regions. The company in a note added that in 2019, the apps ecosystem had more than 400 million monthly active users where nearly 210 billion downloads took place.

"We are accelerating the development of our Huawei mobile services,” said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, in a statement. “Working collaboratively with developers, we will ensure that consumers will be provided with user experiences of the highest quality as we march towards 5G proliferation."

At the moment, popular apps including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Google are not available on the Huawei AppGallery. Even with the claim of 400 million users on its ecosystem, the company's app store is far behind Google Play that in 2015 had roughly 1 billion active monthly users.

This challenge will persist for the Chinese smartphone maker, as in the past, both Microsoft and BlackBerry tried to entice app developers to come to their mobile operating system but failed.