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HUAWEI is building out its app store in case US ban holds
June 16, 2025
HUAWEI appears to be preparing for the U.S. government’s ban to goback in place come mid-August. According to a report fromXDA-Developers, HUAWEI is reaching out to Play Store developers and inviting them to bring their apps to the company’sAppGallery.
To incentivize developers, HUAWEI is promoting the fact that it has shipped over 350 million phones over the last year, all with direct access to AppGallery. Along with that, the Chinese company is promising to support developers and invites them to join its developers community for free.
Below is a snippet of an email sent to a “trusted developer” who wished to remain anonymous:
Cher XXX team,
– In the last 2 years, HUAWEI shipped over 350M phones, about half of them in western markets.
– All HUAWEI phones have our official AppStore “AppGallery” preloaded globally, with 270 million monthly active users.
– We realized that your great Android App XXX is not yet published in our AppGallery.
– to guarantee a smooth usage of your App for our users, HUAWEI is committed to provide you with full support, to help you publish your App into AppGallery.
– We would therefore like to invite you to join our 560k developers community for free, in our HUAWEI Developer portal.
XDApoints out thatthird-party app storesare known to email developers all of the time. For example, Amazon attempts to bring over as many apps as possible for its app store since theFire Tabletdoesn’t have access to Google’s services. As Play Services mightone day not work on HUAWEI hardware, it makes sense that the company is preemptively trying to get popular apps onto its store.
One thing to keep in mind is that if the ban does hold firm, you won’t see a good number of popular apps on HUAWEI’s app store. AsRon Amadeo fromArs Technicahas pointed out, only two out of the top 15 free apps on the Play Store would be able to work on HUAWEI phones as they aren’t based in the U.S.
Do you thinkHuaweiwill be able to get even a quarter of the popular apps found on the Play Store over to its AppGallery? If you own a HUAWEI phone, are you prepared to sideload app updates from places like APKMirror? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
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