The number of Huawei devices is growing and customization of applications for the Huawei AppGallery is becoming more and more popular. Flagship models attract potential users with advanced features, power and design, while younger models allow you to get a quite tolerable device for little money.

My name is Sasha Khrushchev and I am the technical director of the WINFOX IT company. Now I will tell you why it is necessary to adapt applications for Huawei AppGallery and how to do it.

Why it is necessary to adapt applications for Huawei AppGallery

Since the end of 2019, due to the US trade war with China, Huawei devices have been shipped without pre-installed Google services. Therefore, many applications in which these services play a key role cannot be installed on such gadgets. First of all, these services include all Firebase services:

• push notifications;

• deep links;

• analytics;

• crashlitix;

• in-app messaging;

• authorization.

In addition, restrictions apply to the main Google services and libraries based on them. Here is some of them:

• geolocation;

• cards;

• payment, etc.

Without these services, many applications simply cannot perform their primary and secondary functions, leaving users of Huawei devices overboard. Given that the number of users of the latest Huawei smartphones is only growing, for businesses, these restrictions are primarily a loss of customers. In addition, when a business does not respond in a timely manner to changes taking place in the market, this affects its image.

What happens if you do not adapt the application for Huawei AppGallery

So what happens when your app that uses the above services ends up on a Huawei phone that doesn't have Google services installed? Will such an application crash immediately or not start at all? Or maybe you just won't find it in the AppGallery?

To understand how this works, let's delve into the history of Huawei independent infrastructure. When the trade war was in full swing, it was already clear that the license to access Google services could end abruptly. It was required to create an independent infrastructure of mobile services. And such services appeared, which gave the world HMS (Huawei Mobile Services). 

Today, Huawei services include key built-in applications. These include:

• Huawei AppGallery;

• Huawei Browser;

• Huawei Mobile Cloud;

• Huawei Themes;

• Huawei Music;

• Huawei Video;

• Huawei Reader;

• Huawei Assistant and others. 

Huawei services also include almost all the necessary SDKs for developing many different applications. Here are the main of these services:

• Account Kit

• Ad Kit;

• Analytics Kit;

• Awareness Kit;

• drive kit;

• Dynamic Tag Manager;

• game service;

• health kit;

• Identity Kit;

• in-app purchases;

• location kit;

• map kit;

• push kit;

• scan kit;

• search kit;

• site kit;

• Wallet Kit

• Device ID Kit.

If you do not adapt the application on a classic Huawei smartphone

In the case of classic Huawei gadgets, everything revolves on the version of Android inherited from AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and the proprietary EMUI shell, which can be called well-designed and convenient (although not everyone will agree with this). 

If you install an application from an .apk file or from the same AppGallery on a device that uses Google services (yes, you can), this application will work smoothly until any function of these same services starts. For example, displaying a map, getting a geolocation or a token for sending push notifications. At this point, the application will politely inform you that Google services are needed to continue working, and will gently close (or try to continue working without the desired function from Google).

If you do not adapt the application on another smartphone

In addition to classical devices, there are others, non-classical. After all, the same HMS Core can be installed on a smartphone of any other manufacturer with regular Android and Google services, after which applications that somehow use HMS will work. 

This is also true for the reverse situation, since so far the set of applications available in AppGallery is far behind those presented in Google Play. Therefore, advanced users have installed and will continue to install Google services separately on Huawei devices, getting a universal device on which absolutely everything conditionally works.

However, one cannot count on the fact that the audience of such users will be large: most customers who are used to using services in purchased gadgets as is will not install additional services.

How to customize applications for Huawei AppGallery

If you need to adapt an app to work on classic Huawei smartphones and publish in AppGallery, please read the Huawei documentation, prepare for testing, and feel free to contact support if you have any questions. Let's talk in more detail. 

Explore Huawei Documentation

The Huawei documentation has all the examples of using the SDK, and the SDKs themselves are implemented in such a way that the transition from Google services to them is as quick and painless as possible.

 Your developers will not even need to make a separate application - instructions on how to organize two types of assemblies for Google and Huawei within one application take no more than two pages of text.

Important. Trouble can deliver very old applications or cross-platform. In particular, applications on the first version of Flutter may experience compatibility issues with the latest Huawei SDK libraries, such as the Huawei Scan Kit. How to solve such a problem is described in an article on pub dev .

Prepare for testing

To test such applications, you always need a couple of “clean” Huawei devices, on which Google services have not been delivered by someone with skillful hands. Therefore, for testers of the AppGallery application, it seems to be a different, separate platform, although in fact it is the same Android. Consider this fact.

Contact support if you have any questions

Separately, I would like to note the support of Huawei, which works quite adequately and helps to resolve issues for both users and developers. In my practice, there was an experience when Chinese colleagues helped developers solve the problem of library compatibility for two days and as a result found a working workaround.

The main thing about adapting applications for Huawei AppGallery

• Without pre-installed Google services, many applications cannot perform their primary and secondary functions, leaving users of Huawei devices overboard.

• If you install an application from an .apk file or from the same Google Play on a device that does not use Google services, the application will work smoothly until any function implemented using these same services is launched.

• If you need to adapt your app to work on classic Huawei smartphones and publish in AppGallery, please read the Huawei documentation, get ready for testing, and feel free to contact support.

• Adapting to Huawei is not difficult and does not take long. When there are no technical problems, such an adaptation, together with publication and review, usually takes one to two weeks.