Mobile applications on HMS (Huawei Mobile Service)

HMS is the integrated net of services available on Huawei devices. Although the HMS ecosystem has been developed for many years, the biggest dynamisation began in 2019, when Huawei devices have lost access to all kinds of services offered by Google. Currently HMS that served predominantly to use additional Huawei applications via Huawei ID, started to evaluate in the authorial system, independent from Google. At the beginning many users of mobile devices couldn’t imagine the lack of access to applications shared by Google, such as Gmail, Google Maps or YouTube. Over the next years of further development of HMS and HarmonyOS, producers were trying to replace all of the most popular applications or implement them into the AppGallery if possible.

AppGallery is the equivalent of Google Play or AppStore. Currently, the store with applications has the majority of the most popular applications, such as TikTok, Tidal, Bolt, InPost, Booking.com, including financial applications, for instance Revolut or Curve. The scope of shared applications is still growing and for sure the owners of mobile applications will consider adding their app to AppGallery, because in 2021 it was used by over 530 million users. If you would like to know if your favourite application is available in AppGallery, check their official website.

Unfortunately, due to access to Google services, we won’t find in the AppGallery such applications as Google Maps or YouTube. Huawei Mobile Services created dedicated solutions that can replace vital Google apps. For example YouTube may be replaced with YT apps and the alternative for Google Maps is Petal Maps. Some relevant solutions may help us to unofficially download Google services packages on our mobile devices. Therefore, we will access our Gmail or Google Calendar without any problems.

Beside a great choice of applications, AppGallery still has smaller stock than Google Play. We still won’t find such applications like Facebook, Spotify or Twitter. It doesn’t mean that we can’t use them on Huawei devices. Thanks to Petal or APK search engines we can search for mobile applications which we can easily download and install on Huawei devices. In the Petal search engine apart from mobile applications, we can find much more information, graphics, news from the whole world or weather forecast. Remember that when you install the application from external resources you have to take care of its update. More information about Petal search engine is available on its official website.

It can be assumed that introduction of a new operating system will create another challenge for mobile apps developers. After all, mobile applications are dedicated to a particular system. Usually only iOS and Android systems are mentioned. Are there also mobile applications dedicated to the HarmonyOS system? In reality there are no significant differences between mobile applications dedicated to Android and HarmonyOS. Therefore writing an individual solution is not demanded. It can be perfectly seen on the example of many applications available in Petal, which were written for the Android and don’t have any problems with working on HMS.

All of the mobile apps that use external API may be the exception. If the API comes from the source to which HMS doesn’t have access, some of the app functionalities may not work properly.

If you want to add your mobile application to AppGallery, all you have to do is create a developer account. It is worth considering this option, because HMS is still growing and customers are encouraged to use it with many competitions and prizes, which is undoubtedly tempting for new users.

For people who want to learn more about Huawei devices, AppGallery or Petal we recommend ASBYT vlog where you can see how it works directly on a Huawei smartphone and check if it is comfortable to use the smartphone without full access to Google services.