Key Takeaways
Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT app market will reportedly offer over 10,000 apps, satisfying 99.9% of consumers’ needs. Additionally, Huawei has now started blocking sideloading of Android apps to encourage ecosystem growth.
Huawei was once a pretty big player, making great inroads into markets outside of China, competing with the likes of Samsung and Apple. However, the company was shut down in 2019 after it was banned from the US, unable to sell its products there or do business with US companies, which hit its business hard. As expected, Huawei has taken a slick approach over the years, producing new devices with limited resources and even achieving the first release of a tri-fold phone with the Mate XT, trying to regain momentum in every way possible.
Of course, Huawei has made heavy use of Google’s Android on its mobile devices in the past, but was forced to slowly move away from the platform as support for it was no longer available beyond a certain version. That being said, Huawei began developing its own mobile OS, eventually introducing HarmonyOS. Now, it seems Huawei is ready for its next big leap, announcing that the HarmonyOS NEXT app market will support “10,000 applications and meta services” (via 9to5Google). What this means is that Huawei is saying that these apps will support 99.9% of consumers’ needs, which is a very good thing if true.
This is a story I hear very often
While all of this sounds like exciting news, there is one big caveat to this new wave of apps and services: HarmonyOS NEXT has officially dropped support for sideloading Android apps onto the platform. It’s unclear how much of an impact this will have on everyday users, given that Huawei has made great strides to create apps and services for its own ecosystem that supposedly supports 99.9% of consumer needs. Huawei hasn’t been very specific on this point, so it’s unclear whether this figure is intended to meet global or local needs, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s the latter.
Huawei achieved this feat by having over 6 million developers committed to its platform and adopting over 470 SDKs. For the most part, this is all impressive, but pretty mundane. More importantly, it shows that Huawei wouldn’t really get anywhere if it couldn’t give people what they wanted. With such hard work, it’s clear that Huawei doesn’t see itself going anywhere anytime soon. However, it will be interesting to see whether the brand can re-enter the US and other markets in the coming years, or whether it will just fade away as a local brand.
