Huawei has been building a Play Store alternative in plain sight
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The momentous news that Google is cutting off its Android relationship with Huawei in response to a US government ban on the Chinese giant wasn’t much of a surprise to Huawei. A fresh report from Bloomberg today adds to the mounting evidence of Huawei preparing for being shunned by the United States. It suggests that Huawei’s App Gallery, which has been present on Huawei and Honor Android devices for a while, is in fact an earnest, albeit somewhat clandestine, effort to build a genuine alternative to Google’s dominant Play Store.
According to Bloomberg, Huawei pitched app makers in 2018 with the offer of helping them make inroads into China, the world’s largest smartphone market, if they built software for its App Gallery. Like all other…
