Huawei wants Google to become a 'collaborator' in its smartphone application ecosystem

Huawei's smartphone business in international markets (outside of China) suffered a major shock last year after being restricted to the "blacklist" by the US government. trade cooperation. This means that the Chinese tech giant is out of business with the US company, including Google - the owner of the Android platform and a number of other component manufacturers.

Although Huawei has tried to find a way around most barriers, the ban means it cannot launch new devices with the Google Play Store and the entire pre-loaded Google app - a factor. Huawei's smartphone models almost completely lost their competitive advantage in markets outside of China.

So far, Huawei has launched two flagship smartphones, the Mate 30 and the P40, both of which are shipped without any Google services. This omission makes sales of these flagships significantly lower than expected - although this is not a big deal in China because Google is already banned in the country.

To gradually get rid of its dependence on Google in particular and U.S. technology companies in general, Huawei has been trying to build an alternative app store for the Play Store, called AppGallery. But even if AppGallery could become a platform for hundreds of thousands of apps, without Google apps, Huawei devices would still be hard-pressed to attract customers outside of China. Like Gmail, Drive or Photos, these are extremely popular Google services with hundreds of millions of regular users.

Huawei wants Google to become a 'collaborator' in its smartphone application ecosystem Picture 1

For this reason, Huawei CEO Eric Xu has come up with a new strategy in the hope that Google can submit their applications to AppGallery - similar to a third-party service developer, to Huawei users can use Google services, regardless of not owning Google Play and not running on the Android platform. Mr. Xu called this a "mutually beneficial cooperation strategy", without violating the US ban.

'We hope Google services can appear on our AppGallery, the same way Google services are available on Apple's App Store.'

This is the same as for the App Store, if you accept Mr. Xu's 'initiative', Google will send its applications to Huawei for 'approval' to appear on AppGallery.

This is a unique Huawei strategy, although its success depends on whether Google really cares about submitting its apps to AppGallery.