Huawei exploring IndusOS’s AppBazaar app store in India as a Google Play Store alternative
It is no secret that Huawei has been having a rough time dealing with the fallout from being placed on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List. While their operations within China remain unaffected by this, their operations outside of China have been massively affected, especially in the smartphone market. The Entity List prevents U.S. companies from doing business with this Chinese company, which in turn prevents Google from licensing its Google Mobile Services and accompanying suite of apps to Huawei for new devices. Google has applied again for an exemption, but while that takes its own sweet time to get sorted, Huawei is in the market looking for options. And it may have settled on IndusOS’s AppBazaar for its app distribution needs in the Indian region, according to a report.
If the name IndusOS sounds vaguely familiar, you may have heard about them in connection with Indic support in app stores like the Samsung Galaxy App Store. Back in early 2019, Samsung had partnered with IndusOS’s AppBazaar to allow Samsung Galaxy users in India to browse apps in their native languages instead of just English. Currently, IndusOS’s AppBazaar app store has more than 400,000 regional apps in 12 local languages, namely Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.
According to a report from Economic Times, Huawei is looking to sign a deal with IndusOS to offer a curated Android app store on Huawei and Honor smartphones. The report suggests that the deal is within the context of the Indian market, but both the companies are exploring whether the partnership can be expanded globally. This does not mean that we will directly see AppBazaar being included on EMUI devices in India, but we can expect solutions employed within AppBazaar also be employed in other fashions on these devices.
Huawei faces the steep challenge of convincing average users to use its smartphones without Google apps, which also breaks down the entire chain of connected apps and APIs in other non-Google apps. Huawei does have its own AppGallery alternative for the Play Store, but since the company has approached an alternative app store for its business in India, one can presume that the store is not doing too well. Partnering with IndusOS might just be what Huawei needs to stay in the Indian and global market for longer. Though, it is still difficult to find convincing reasons to purchase a non-Google Huawei smartphone when hundreds of other options exist, even with Indic language support.
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