Huawei has been growing rapidly when it comes to smartphones and had plans to dethrone Samsung and Apple to become the dominating smartphone brand globally. However, this seems nearly impossible in the short term after the ban on the company by the United States.
But the company’s executives claim that they were prepared for such situation and had been working on the possible worst-case scenario from at least past one year. It has a stockpile of chipsets for the coming months and has been working on its own operating system from quite some time.
Now, a report says that the company also has been building its own app store as a replacement for the Google Play Store. The report adds that Huawei made a pitch to app makers last year to build software for a new Huawei app store outside China.
The Chinese tech giant told potential partners that by the end of 2018, it would have 50 million Europeans using its own app store, rather than Google’s, according to a report from Bloomberg News. The company also held talks with European wireless network carriers about spreading this new app store even further.
This shows how important the European market is for Huawei. It held more than 20% of the smartphone market in 22 countries in Europe, including Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. While the company has been banned in the United States, the threat also extends to Europe and could possibly lose its hard-won status as the world’s second-largest smartphone maker.
Without support from Google, Huawei’s app store plan doesn’t have a strong future as Chinese company continues to rely on Android to power its smartphones globally and relies on Google’s most popular apps to win mobile phone shoppers.
This will make it very hard for Huawei to compete with its biggest smartphone rivals like Samsung and Apple. While Samsung has unfettered access to the Play store and other Google services, Apple has already built its own successful app store over the past decade.
Recently, the US Commerce Department effectively delayed some of the consequences of the executive order by 90 days. It allows the company to purchase American-made goods “in order to maintain existing networks and provide software updates to existing Huawei handsets.”
