Over 1.5 million developers have already flocked to the Huawei AppGallery, Huawei's alternative to the Google Play Store

The Huawei AppGallery has been around for a while now, with Honor and Huawei pre-installing it on all their smartphones and tablets While the AppGallery has been the primary package manager for Honor and Huawei devices in China, the two companies relied on the Google Play Store for many other markets. That is until trade sanctions imposed by the US forced Huawei and its subsidiaries to release new devices without Google Mobile Services (GMS) or the Google Play Store.

Huawei can re-release older devices that are pre-installed with GMS and the Play Store, as it has done with the P30 Pro, but that is hardly a sustainable business model going forwards. In response, the company has been building out its Huawei Mobile Services (HMS). A part of this has been encouraging developers outside of China to embrace the AppGallery through various incentives.

According to Huawei, over 1.5 million developers have registered with the AppGallery, an increase of 115% on last year. Similarly, there are now 60,000 apps that have been connected to HMS too, an increase of 66.7%. Naturally, the volume of apps or developers tied to the AppGallery does not speak for quality. It is worth keeping in mind that Huawei contains to position the AppGallery as "boutique", so it is unlikely to compete with the Google Play Store on volume anytime soon.