Potentially the biggest casualty of the US-China trade war is Huawei. The company is currently on a sticky wicket as it was included in a trade blacklist issued by the Trump Administration. As a result, Google pulled Android OS support from future Huawei devices, leaving the Chinese tech giant scurrying for an alternative OS, and an app store. A media report has now claimed that Huawei is already in talks with Aptoide – an alternative marketplace for mobile applications which runs on Android. The company is also looking to bolster its own AppGallery simultaneously.
After Google decision to pull the Android OS support, Huawei can no longer have access to Google Play Services or other Google apps, though it can still rely on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) builds for future devices. While it has already received a 90-day window to roll out software updates to smartphones that were released up until May 16, 2019, the company will still need to get an app store to support the OS. Huawei’s indigenously-developed OS is expected to launch as early as this fall “and at the latest next spring”.
Getting Aptoide on-board may be a viable decision for the company because it is expected to ease the transition from Android to the news OS. Unlike the Google Play Store, Aptoide is not a centraliseed store and instead gives users the ability to manage their own store. Richard Yu, Consumer Business CEO at Huawei, revealed that Huawei's operating system is “compatible with all Android applications and all web applications.” Alongside repositories like APK Mirror, Aptoide is a popular source to download Android apps. Aptoide reportedly hosts more than 900,000 apps with almost 200 million users.
There is also a report which says that Huawei is trying to pursue developers to publish their apps directly on the company’s AppGallery. Google apps like YouTube and Google Maps are available on Aptoide, but it's unclear if Huawei users will be able to access them or not. Reportedly, the AppGallery catered to 50 million users by the end of 2018. At the same time, Huawei is also trying to incentivize European telecom operators to pre-install the AppGallery.