Huawei has been preparing for a similar moment for years, and now the US-China trade war has arrived to complicate the company’s relationship with Android. Huawei is well aware of the challenges, though. The company has been building a Play Store alternative in plain sight, and it reportedly pitched app makers last year on creating apps for its store with the offer of helping them make inroads into China and a “very significant” share of the app store’s revenue. Bloomberg reports that Huawei even claimed it would have 50 million European users of its app store by the end of 2018.
Huawei’s store plans and discussions come at a pivotal time for Android in Europe. Google could finally face some competition after a European Commission lawsuit fined the company over Android antitrust violations. Regulators allege that Google abused its Android market dominance by bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into Android, blocking phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and making payments to manufacturers and network operators to bundle the Google search app on handsets.
As a result, Google will start charging Android device makers a fee for using its apps in Europe. This could open the door to rival app stores, a more competitive landscape for Android, and inevitable fragmentation. The more likely result is that manufacturers will simply continue to bundle google’s apps and services, since it’ll allow them to avoid those fees. There are still no popular alternatives to YouTube, Google Maps, or Google Search, after all, and consumers across Europe will reject phones that don’t have access to these apps. Phone makers also aren’t likely to want to maintain different versions of Android for Europe, China, the US, and elsewhere.
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