Huawei Mobile Services is Huawei's alternative to Google Mobile Services and contains the Apps and services which launch with Huawei devices as standard. HMS consists of seven key services and HMS Core which supports app development on the platform. These are Huawei ID, Cloud, App Gallery, Themes, Huawei Video, Browser, Assistant. Huawei Quick Apps is Huawei’s alternative to Google Instant Apps. By January 2020 over 50,000 apps had been integrated with HMS Core.. Its rival, Google Mobile Services has 3 million apps on Google's Play Store. The App Gallery also laid claim to 180 billion downloads in 2019. In March 2020, HMS was used by 650 million monthly active users across 170 countries.
HMS on Android
May 2019 proved to be a significant change to HMS, when Google was prohibited from working with Huawei on any new devices. This also included bundling Google’s Apps, including Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Any new Huawei devices launched after 16th May 2019 were unable to receive updates from Google services and would be considered 'uncertified' meaning Huawei’s only solution at the time was to turn HMS into a genuine competitor to Google and incentivize app developers to utilize the platform. HMS is available on the Honor 9X Pro, View 30 Pro, Huawei Mate XS. HMS is also available, alongside GMS, on many other Huawei models launched before the ban. Huawei promised developers it would take, “less than 10 minutes", to port their app over to HMS - to illustrate the ease of portability between Google’s Play Store and the HMS App Gallery.
HMS Core
is a hub for Huawei Mobile Services and serves as a toolkit for app development on Huawei devices. The core comprises of Development, Growth and Monetizing.
HMS AppGallery
The HMS App Gallery has a key rival, Google’s Play Store on Android. The HMS App Gallery is available in 170 countries, across 78 languages. By summer 2019, registered developers to develop apps for the App Gallery grew to 910,000 and Core app integration doubled in the same timeframe.
Reception of HMS
The reception of HMS is mixed, with the majority of discussion based around the key Google/Android apps which are not yet present on the AppGallery and whether or not this presents a significant problem to users. The open development of HMS Core, has been regarded by some as benefiting the Android project as a whole, “If Huawei continues to invest in a holistically open approach... the result could be that we could all end up a bit less beholden to Google".
