Huawei’s App Gallery is part of its alternative OS

Not much is known about Huawei’s Android and Windows alternative, but it appears to be based on the open source version of Android (AOSP) and will include Huawei’s App Gallery store. This is Huawei’s alternative to Google’s Play Store, and every manufacturer that doesn’t license Google’s version of Android has to create its own app store or bundle one from a myriad of fragmented options. Huawei already has experience here, as the company’s phones run a forked AOSP-based version of Android without the Play Store in China, and Huawei’s been bundling the App Gallery on phones outside of China since early 2018.

Outside of China, phones running alternatives to Android and even those using AOSP haven’t fared well. Mozilla tried with its Firefox OS for years before giving up in 2015, Canonical pushed Ubuntu phones that never went anywhere, and Microsoft famously tried to create a third mobile operating system with Windows Phone. Even Samsung, once a big threat to Google’s version of Android, has all but given up on its Tizen operating system for phones, using it to power the company’s smartwatches and TVs instead. And let’s not even talk about what happened to BlackBerry.

All of these phone OS alternatives have failed for many different reasons, but chief among them is a common thread: competing with Google is very difficult. Google’s search market share is estimated at around 90 percent worldwide, with competitors like Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex all making up single digits. This search market share has helped Google create and control a suite of apps like Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Docs, and many other popular web services.

If you create a phone running the open source version of Android, it immediately comes without access to these key Google apps. As a manufacturer, you’re creating a device without the apps consumers demand in Europe, the US, and elsewhere.

Ref: theverge.com