I was curious about how many of you have decided to give a try and publish your app at Huawei App Gallery. There are multiple app stores worldwide, and of course, the main two are well known. The rest, such as Amazon App Store is not so popular. However, Huawei is in a bit different situation and allows app makers to enter the Chinese market, which is pretty large.
Have you tried to publish your app at Huawei? What were your motivations? How was the integration experience with HMS core services? And how do you cope with localization for the Chinese market?
On the other side, it would be great to hear also from those who decided to not pursue this opportunity.
After my experience with Amazon App Store vs. Google Play Store, I hesitated to try Huawei AppGallery. The fact is that Amazon Store is not worth it. At least for smaller productivity apps. The audience is too small.
However, when the US government banned Huawei and Huawei lost Google Play services, I decided to give it a try.
The first version I published was just a clone of the Google Play one, and it wasn’t integrated with HMS at all - I just disabled features that relied on Google services.
The number of downloads was far higher than from the Amazon Store from day one. That was interesting, but, e.q., ads in the free version weren’t performing well because clicks on ads for almost all ads network lead to Google Play. So that was the first reason to go with HMS. The second reason for me was Huawei’s manager’s friendliness and proactivity - I was in touch with the head of the ecosystem for our country, and his attitude was awesome.
Their developers even helped me introduce the services and guide me on what I should replace with the HMS variant and how. They try hard to fight with Google’s monopoly, and they are doing a great job.
HMS integration was simple and straightforward. Excellent step-by-step documentation is available; cloud debugging allowed me to test everything on different Huawei devices even if I don’t own them. Smooth. I would say that the integration of in-app purchases was more straightforward than with Google Play. HMS Ads are so close to any other ads SDK that I could add them to my existing handler literary in minutes.
The next step for me is to enter the Chinese market. There are some special requirements, and I’m keen on learning the process and share it with other users of Localazy - help them to enter the large Chinese market. Anyone with experience on this? I would love to connect.
If anyone here is thinking about Huawei AppGallery, ping me, and I can connect you to their representatives.
Some time ago I was trying to reach more people and got an idea to publish my apps to the Huawei app market, so I did it. I just have pushed the same APK as I use for Google Play. At the moment no time to replace all with HMS.
I don’t know would Google have anything against to have a code for implementation of HMS on Apk which is on Google Play?
To be more precise, i won’t have two different sources for that, i prefer having both in code and just use if statenemt to toggle any of them, or maybe use build flavors, hmm
At the moment, for my app, I use product flavors to build several completely independent versions. I use two dimensions: price (free and full) and store:
gp for Google Play
am for Amazon Store
ha for Huawei AppGallery
sa for Samsung Apps (but I haven’t published it here yet, I had some issues with their web interface)
gn for General build (only available in free version and use for direct APK upload)
Then I have, e.q., AdsController which is available in several places:
src/ha/java/... for HMS-based version
src/gp/java/... for Google-based version
Only problem I have at the moment is that I don’t want to use HMS plugin for Google builds, so I use simple bash script to switch between HMS and other versions in build.gradle - technically, this script just comment/uncomment a few annotated lines. There is probably better solution, but I was a bit in hurry and this works well so far :-).
