Huawei AppGallery: the third largest app store in the world

Huawei introduced its AppGallery store, created for users of its smartphones, which opens the door to a universe of world-class applications and offers a new alternative.

Huawei AppGallery: the third largest app store in the world
Photo by Zana Latif / Unsplash

Huawei officially launched its application store, which already has 400 million active users around the world. With over 219 billion app downloads worldwide by 2019, it is positioned as a new option for consumers looking for a safe and reliable alternative to the App Store and Google Play. Huawei announced its AppGallery store, created for users of its smartphones, which opens the door to a universe of world-class applications and offers a new alternative to improve the user experience. With operations in more than 170 countries/regions and 400 million active users per month, the app store is positioned as one of the three industry leaders globally.

Privacy under your control: the core of the Huawei philosophy

The protection of privacy and cybersecurity are part of the priorities of the brand's commercial operations, strictly implemented in all phases of research and development of each of its products. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, the Chinese multinational established a solid base for the development of its ecosystem and added to Huawei Mobile Services opens a wide spectrum of software capabilities, providing the best and most innovative application experience for the users of its smartphones.

Huawei has invested in more than 3,000 expert engineers around the world to create its ecosystem and provide comprehensive operational support to developers worldwide. It also provides funding for the Shining-Star program to encourage innovation in local markets.

Huawei 5G network. Stock image
Huawei 5G network. Stock image

AppGallery, the trusted store for downloading applications

In keeping with its promises of value and providing its customers with everything they need, Huawei performs a full cycle of application security and protection to prevent malicious activity once installed on the users' smartphone. That cycle consists of four review steps for safe operation, including, for example, verification of the developer's real name. The company also added an age rating system for all its users, which creates a safe environment for children and intelligently filters which applications are suitable for their age range.

It should be noted that to eliminate the risk of information leakage, AppGallery applies the highest level of verification to isolate and protect the privacy of users. Personal and sensitive data, such as biometric information, will never be processed outside of a Huawei device, giving the user complete control over their personal data. Similarly, the EMUI operating system allows users to have control over application permissions, while handling all their information anonymously and storing it locally. This process works according to each user's region.

An innovative and intelligent experience

The applications downloaded from AppGallery are optimized to work on Huawei devices, offering a remarkable capacity. The key enabler is the Huawei HiAI, an open AI-enabled platform for smart devices, which brings together the software and hardware resources of different teams and facilitates collaborative, mutually reinforcing interactions. For example, the WPS Office application uses HiAI capability to achieve super-resolution OCR that identifies text in images as scanned documents and photos. In the application, documents are automatically detected and corrected, greatly increasing productivity.

A "touch to use" experience

Quick Apps is an application ecosystem that hosts a new type of application without installation. It provides a good user experience, powerful features, and automatic updates for HTML5 pages, consuming little memory space. Despite offering users the same experience as native applications, Quick Apps is written with only one-fifth of the code compared to Android, so it takes up less memory space. Users can accommodate over 2000 Quick Apps instead of 20 native applications with only 1 GB of space.

Favorite Quick Apps can be added to the desktop for convenient access. This application ecosystem is used on over 350 million Huawei phones and there are over 1,700 Quick Apps released worldwide, with a 200% growth year over year. To keep pace with 5G, Quick Apps will gradually expand to more countries and regions, opening up the mature rapid application standards of the Chinese market and the IDE tools for developers worldwide.

All developers around the world are welcome to publish Quick Apps to jointly provide users with a no-installation, no-use experience. Huawei has the right technical knowledge and experience to implement an industry-leading security infrastructure. It has over nine years of experience in creating and incorporating applications and over 270 experts supporting application developers.

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The forecasts are encouraging for this market. In the area of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) alone, Frost & Sullivan noted that the sector, which had generated about $1.8 billion in 2017, had a compound annual growth forecast (CAGR) of 31.9 percent to $7.4 billion by 2022.

Huawei's long-term strategy is to develop an impartial and open ecosystem. It is committed to playing a key role in its promotion and prosperity. Three main pillars contribute to Huawei providing the best AppGallery experience: privacy and security protection, access to global quality applications, and innovative and high-quality application downloads.

5G will boost development potential

The fifth generation of communications, known as 5G, will be the best option for driving business processes in Latin America for years to come, improving everything from the user shopping experience to automation in the business, government, and social sectors. Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of Huawei, spoke about the challenges in the region in recent days during a roundtable for Latin American and Spanish media, and emphasized the importance of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to boost local markets.

Ren detailed what 5G technology will offer humanity in the next decade. One of the most important examples, he said, is that of the development of the field in Latin American countries, where the successful implementation of 5G technology could serve to support Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality, and thus set up autonomous farms and port terminals with remote control. This will result in the export of animal and plant products from the region with optimum quality and efficiency, thus improving Latin American trade with the entire world.

Huawei's CEO emphasized how today the region's development is not intrinsically related to geographic location, as telecommunications networks, including 5G technology, are being developed simultaneously around the world, which in the near future will increase the speed of information exchange. "The successful deployment of the 5G network will allow all countries in the region to have access to the state-of-the-art technology to increase the levels of competitiveness to reach the maximum potential of Latin America in the coming years," said Ren. Some of the advantages of the successful implementation of the 5G network in Latin America will be based on the ability to offer standard speeds of 20 Gbps per second, greater battery savings on devices, and having more devices connected at the same time without slowing down the technological infrastructure.

Today, Mexico is the center of Huawei's technology, attention, and production in Latin America, and it will also be the future regional center of new operations for the company. Currently, Huawei has opened the Huawei Academy for ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in collaboration with more than ten universities in the country, also through programs such as "Seeds for the Future". In addition, in the last ten years, Huawei has trained more than ten thousand professionals and has supported the deployment of programs whose goal is to connect more Mexicans, who will still benefit from 4G networks in Mexico. Ren said he is sure that the increase in the use of applications based on Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things or Augmented Reality will significantly improve the productivity of industrial plants, so highly trained professionals will be needed to operate these new technologies.

Without a doubt, the new technologies are rapidly narrowing the gap between countries in terms of their level of development. For Huawei's CEO and hand in hand with the new developments, it will be vital to make a strong commitment to professional training so that future talents are up to the task in a new, considerably more automated society. "Huawei is developing innovative technologies, which seek to boost social and industrial development to help more people overcome poverty throughout Latin America," said Huawei's CEO.

Huawei cloud in Latin America and more competitive in data centers

Latin America is an increasingly large, interesting, and connected market and, therefore, began to awaken the interest of large companies that are dedicated to the world of the cloud. Google, for example, already has a data center installed in Chile and, recently, rumors were heard that the company could invest in expanding its presence in that country. Brazil is the country with the highest development in data centers and cloud, with a market share in IaaS of approximately 50 percent, following the data from the consulting firm. However, the installed capacity in that country is mainly to meet local demand. In the rest of the region, demand is being supplied by local data centers -many in the hands of telecommunication operators- and by clouds located in the United States or other countries of the world.

Last year Amazon Web Services (AWS) was also evaluating landing in the region with a data center, but its plans appear to have been frozen. After evaluating opportunities in Argentina and Chile, the only investment known from the U.S. giant is the opening of a contact center in Colombia. But the cloud business continues to grow and there is already a Latin American country that is trying to become the cloud hub for the region. It is, precisely, Chile that has a Google data center and has just captured an investment of $100 million by Huawei to be the gateway to the public cloud of the Chinese company.

Huawei has an agreement with Telefonica for its cloud business but the growing development of its business in the Latin American market - and perhaps also the doors that were closed to it in other parts of the world - meant that its gaze is set on growing in the region with its investments.

The announcement was made during the Huawei Cloud Chile Summit

Huawei will build a data center in that country and bring to Latin America its public cloud, to offer a range of computer storage solutions, networks, databases and, of course, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to the authorities of the Chinese company, Huawei Cloud is part of a trinomial that has as protagonists the future 5G network, the cloud and artificial intelligence, three technologies that are combined in the digital transformation of organizations, cities, and public administration.

The new data center to be opened in Chile will serve other countries in the region, just as Google's, located in Santiago, is currently doing. With this news, Chile seems to be beginning to transform itself into an attractive center for data center investments with expectations of serving all of Latin America.

Huawei Cloud's landing shows that the trend is beginning to change and that big players are beginning to look to Latin America as fertile ground to build and operate their data centers. The question that remains now is whether, as new players arrive in the region, operators will follow Telefonica's lead or persist in maintaining the management of their data centers when there are other companies that do it better and on a larger scale. After all, everything indicates that the world is multi-cloud and the role of operators is not to maintain data centers but to offer services that allow access to and management of those multiple clouds.