Over 4 million developers have joined up to build on the Harmony platform, with 134,000 apps currently using Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) Core, according to Huawei in a recent announcement. HMS Core is always improving, and yesterday’s event saw the release of version 6.0, which includes enhanced support for Huawei’s cloud services.
Apps and data will be retained on eligible devices that transition to Harmony OS 2.0. Only apps that rely on Google Play services will be excluded from this. With backwards compatibility taken care of, Huawei is looking forward to the day when Harmony OS can run its own software rather than Android apps. Right now, there are a growing number of apps that are built exclusively for Huawei, but the Harmony OS is still mostly dependant on apps developed for Android.
Huawei wants to be able to compete with Android and iOS for a share of the incredibly competitive mobile market. At the moment, it’s rapidly growing in popularity, and Huawei aims to become one of the most used mobile operating systems in the world. The growing number of apps available on the Harmony OS is a big part of that reason. Consumers are attracted to quality apps that let them enjoy their phones. Games, social media, news and utility apps such as maps and weather are all very important, with mobile games including Roulette having a big impact on how successful an operating system is.
Apps UP
The Huawei HMS Global Application Innovation Competition 2021 was recently announced in an effort to boost the number of developers participating in building apps for Harmony OS. This event seeks to challenge developers to design new apps based on HMS Core that are both unique and useful. Because the event’s name is a bit of a mouthful, it’s known as Apps UP in short.
The competition is open to mobile developers from China, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa, and there are prizes to be won. The prize pool is worth $1 million in total, but Huawei will also provide tangible benefits such as marketing assistance, cloud resources, and incentives for adopting HMS Core’s payment system, among other things.
Huawei hopes that this competition will help incentivize more developers to get involved with developing apps for the operating system. As more apps emerge on Harmony OS, consumers will be more attracted to it, and Huawei will be hoping that many make the switch from Android or iOS.
Huawei’s Growing Presence
Over 10 million people can already enjoy the tens of thousands of apps available on Huawei devices. The Chinese mobile giant claims Harmony OS is now the world’s third-largest mobile ecosystem, only behind iOS and Android. Depending on how you count mobile ecosystems, this may or may not be true. For example, KaiOS was available on 100 million devices a couple of years ago.
This is just the first stage of the Harmony OS 2.0 rollout to older devices, which will continue throughout next year. All new Huawei devices will also run this operating system as standard, increasing the number of users further. Considering Huawei sells around 200 million phones a year, that’s a lot of potential for new users. In related news, the Huawei Watch 3 and 3 Pro are now available in China, while the MatePad Pro 12.6 (2021) was released just yesterday. These devices will most likely be launching to new markets soon and are an example of how fast the Huawei brand has grown globally.
