Huawei AppGallery-The Daily Ledger

Huawei AppGallery (abbreviated as AppGallery) is a package manager and application distribution platform, or marketplace 'app store', developed by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. It serves as the official app store for devices running Huawei HarmonyOS; Microsoft Windows 11 is also supported.

In 2022, AppGallery was used by 580 million monthly active users.

Huawei AppGallery

History

Huawei AppGallery was launched in 2011 in China and in 2018 internationally.

Huawei AppGallery

In May 2019, Huawei was added to the Entity List by the US Department of Commerce, effectively banning the company's software products from gaining access to Google Mobile Services (GMS), Google Play Store and other such applications. As a result, Huawei began releasing its new devices with its own AppGallery, in which the apps were programmed with its own proprietary Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).

Huawei AppGallery

On August 9, 2019, soon after the US ban, Huawei launched HarmonyOS, first on smart TVs for Honor Vision and Vision S. In 2019 there were 45,000 Android apps using HMS on AppGallery.

During the third quarter of 2020, AppGallery had reached 350 billion app downloads. In 2020, AppGallery had 490 million users in over 170 countries and regions, On 1 March 2021, AppGallery had over 530 million active users.

Then, on June 2, 2021, Huawei launched HarmonyOS 2.0 with AppGallery pre-installed on its own smartphones and tablets. About a week later, Huawei launched a separate HarmonyOS section on its AppGallery to recommend HarmonyOS apps and compatible Android apps. Apps specifically made for HarmonyOS carried a small "HMOS" badge in the right hand corner of the app icon.

On July 27, 2022, during the HarmonyOS 3 event, Huawei revealed that the HMS ecosystem had 5.4 million global developers, up from roughly 1.6 million developers in 2020. In October 2022, AppGallery had 580 million monthly active users.

Number of apps

In 2020, AppGallery had more than 96,000 apps and over 50,000 HMS-enabled apps. During Huawei's "Apps Up" event in 2021 the company announced that 134,000 apps were building on the Harmony platform (using Huawei Mobile Services). By October 2022, AppGallery had established itself as one of the world’s top app markets, with over 220,000 HMS-based apps.