Trump effect? Huawei gears up to take on Android, iOS app stores with plans for 100,000 apps on HarmonyOS

Huawei HarmonyOS

Back in 2016 when Donald Trump became president of the United States of America, Huawei was making its presence felt outside of China. Two years later in 2018, Huawei had become a dominant force in Asia and making in-roads in the US and European smartphone markets. However, in 2019, Trump dealt a deadly blow to Huawei by imposing strict sanctions, which resulted in Google pulling out its apps and services from all Huawei phones. Now, Trump will once again become the US president in January 25 and Huawei is being more proactive this time.

According to several online reports, Xu Zhijun, chairman, Huawei has said that the company plans to put as many as 100,000 apps on its own app store. In 2019, when Huawei was sanctioned, three months later it announced its own OS to counter Google’s Android. Called HarmonyOS, the operating system has close to 15,000 apps right now. These apps include Chinese offerings like Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s online shopping app TaoBao.

“Based on our analysis, for the Harmony ecosystem to be mature in meeting consumer needs, 100,000 apps is the milestone, and that is the key objective over the next six to 12 months,” Xu said in a speech posted on the WeChat messaging app, as per a report by Reuters.
Mate 70 with HarmonyOS
Later this week, Huawei is set to launch its Mate 70 series of smartphones — rival of iPhone 16 series — and it is expected to run HarmonyOS. When Huawei launched the Mate 60 series earlier this year, it incorporated its own self-developed processor. Most other Android phones have to rely on Qualcomm or MediaTek processors.
The chairman of Huawei further said that Huawei was “forced  accelerate developing its own operating system,” after the US sanctions. He also said that that the company has made quite a bit of progress but wants more people to use it. “For any operating system, no matter how advanced it is, it would be of no value if no one uses it,” he said. He further encouraged developers to make their app offerings better and diverse. He also said that the government agencies, state companies should use Harmony as their operating system at work.