Huawei App Development
The big 3 market
All three, Apple, Android and Huawei, produce both hardware and software, with the difference that Google’s basic functionalities were also, until 2019, available to everyone.
There are different types of smartphones currently on the market:
Apple smartphones, which exclusively use iOS as an operating system and can, depending on the app implementation, directly use Google services.
- Pre-2019 Huawei smartphones, which have dual app stores, the Google Play Store and the App Gallery.
- Post-2019 Huawei smartphones, which only have the App Gallery store.
- smartphones from other manufacturers, which keep using the Google Play Store and the services associated with Google.
Why an Android app developed for the Google Play Store is not compatible with a Huawei app (and vice versa)
Android applications of a certain level necessarily use Google services, like an app that displays a map, or has in-app purchases, or sends usage statistics to the server, or has push notifications, or is geolocated, etc. These and many other features are offered by Google libraries and find their equivalent in Huawei libraries. This means that when an App is born and developed for the Google Play Store it also has to work on Huawei’s App Gallery, these libraries must be removed and replaced with the native ones offered by Huawei by modifying the original App code to make it compatible.
Some history to understand
In 2019 Donald Trump announced the termination of American relations with Huawei, which was considered a threat to national security. The decision puts into practice what had already begun in February of the previous year, when US intelligence had defined Huawei’s systems and devices as “unsafe” for privacy, accusing Huawei of spying on its users’ communications and collecting data to be sent to Beijing.
The break between Google and Huawei therefore has a purely political and surely also economical motivation, in fact the Chinese company is not only a leader in the smartphone market but is also among the largest and most important companies in the world when it comes to communication technologies.
The Trump Ban, however, didn’t undermine Huawei. It’s true that the divorce from Google means that the American company will not supply hardware, software and services to Huawei anymore, and Huawei will not be able to access the Google Play Store and apps developed by Mountain View, but the Chinese giant responded by becoming technologically independent and creating the Huawei app store, App Gallery, where Huawei apps can be downloaded.
