The Designation That Changed Everything
On 16 May 2019, the US Department of Commerce added Huawei Technologies to the Entity List ↗, a roster of foreign companies subject to export-licence requirements. The practical consequence arrived almost immediately: Google withdrew access to Google Mobile Services — the licensed bundle of apps, APIs and services that sits beneath the consumer-facing Android experience on most non-Chinese devices. Huawei handsets shipping after August 2019 could no longer include the Google Play Store, Gmail, Maps or YouTube as preinstalled, licensed applications.
That single designation made AppGallery, Huawei's app distribution platform, a strategic necessity rather than a secondary channel. The company had operated AppGallery since 2018, primarily as a Chinese domestic store where Google's services had never been available anyway. Outside China, it had been a largely vestigial product. After the Entity List entry, it became Huawei's only route to delivering a functioning app ecosystem to the hundreds of millions of devices it still expected to sell internationally.
What Huawei Built, and What It Published
Huawei responded with Huawei Mobile Services, a parallel stack designed to replicate the core functions of Google Mobile Services without using Google's code. The centrepiece was HMS Core, a set of developer APIs covering maps, push notifications, identity, payments and analytics. Developers willing to integrate HMS Core could, in theory, distribute through AppGallery to Huawei's installed base without going near Google Play.
The catalogue grew substantially in the years following 2019. Huawei has published figures claiming more than 580 million monthly active users globally and a catalogue exceeding 2.7 million apps as of figures the company disclosed in 2022 and 2023, though those counts include the Chinese domestic market, where AppGallery operates without the constraints that apply elsewhere and where competing Chinese stores do not exist on Huawei hardware. The international catalogue — covering Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia — is materially smaller, and major US-headquartered applications, including those from Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance's TikTok, have been inconsistent or absent in their AppGallery availability.
The designation in numbers
Huawei's published developer terms for AppGallery set a revenue share of 30 percent for most paid apps and in-app purchases — identical to the headline rate Apple and Google apply — with adjustments for games, which Huawei has at times routed through a separate monetisation arrangement with its gaming platform. The terms, as published on the Huawei developer portal, also require apps to pass a security review before distribution, a process functionally comparable to the notarisation requirement Apple introduced in the EU under the Digital Markets Act, though operating under entirely different legal conditions and without the regulatory impetus that drove Apple's version.
Where AppGallery Sits in the Global Landscape
The global store landscape has consolidated significantly since 2019. Google Play and Apple's App Store continue to account for the overwhelming majority of app revenue in markets outside China. Within China, domestic stores — including those operated by Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, alongside AppGallery — divide a market that operates on separate rules from the rest of the world. Sensor Tower and data.ai estimates consistently place AppGallery's international download share well below both of the dominant Western platforms, though its position in specific markets — notably parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where Huawei maintained strong device market share — is more competitive than global aggregates suggest.
The deeper problem for AppGallery internationally is a developer calculus familiar from every platform's early years: users do not come without apps, and developers do not invest in a second integration without users. Integrating HMS Core alongside the Google Play Services SDK ↗ represents a real engineering cost, and the international user base Huawei can offer in return has shrunk as its device shipments outside China fell sharply after 2020. The Entity List entry did not destroy AppGallery, but it defined the ceiling under which it now operates.
