Huawei struggles to sell phones without Google’s apps

China’s Huawei Technologies, barred by the US from buying American technology, is having a hard time replacing Google.

China’s Huawei Technologies, barred by the US from buying American technology, has found a lot of workarounds — but is having a hard time replacing Google, on which it has relied for a decade.

Without the search-and-software giant’s apps, smartphone fixtures around the world, the once-relentless march of Huawei’s phones is faltering. Overall smartphone demand globally suffered a record fall in the first quarter, as the coronavirus ravaged the world economy and up-ended supply chains. But Huawei’s smartphone shipments outside China dropped 35 per cent, more than twice rival Samsung Electronics’ decline and four times Apple’s, according to data tracker Canalys.

The collapse threatens Huawei’s hard-won position as the No 2 global cellphone brand after Samsung and the company’s broader consumer-gadgets business, a thriving area that last year contributed more than half of its $US122bn in revenue.

The ban on buying from US suppliers remains the most visibly damaging of the many blows that the Trump administration has struck against Huawei. The company has responded by reordering its supply chain to bypass the US and developing its own chips and other replacement parts. It continues to rack up contracts to build 5G networks globally.

Replacing the contributions of Alphabet’s Google has proved tougher. Google’s Android — which runs more than four-fifths of the world’s smartphones — is an open-source operating system, meaning Huawei devices can still use it. But Google apps and other proprietary software are off-limits for Huawei phones introduced after the US Commerce Department ban on American suppliers was enacted last May.

Huawei is now launching devices with an in-house software package, Huawei Mobile Services, that includes alternatives, such as its own web browser to replace Google’s Chrome and its own email app to replace Gmail.

Its AppGallery app store is meant to replace Google Play, though the blacklisting means the store lacks popular selections like Facebook and Google’s YouTube. Huawei says it has recruited more than a million developers to produce programs for the store.

In the past year, Huawei has launched two flagship smartphones — the P40 and the Mate 30 — running on the homemade software. Its share of China’s smartphone market has grown in that time, but consumers elsewhere say Google apps are hard to go without, and have been slow to embrace Huawei’s alternatives.

“You really don’t see how many Google apps you use daily until you don’t have it any more,” said Allan Anthony, a New Jersey smartphone enthusiast who recently purchased a P40 to complement his iPhone.

“AppGallery is cool, but very limited,” he said, offering “maybe about 40 per cent of the apps I use every day”.

To fill out its store, Huawei said it was offering numerous incentives to recruit app developers, including advertising in its app store and what it says is generous revenue sharing. AppGallery, launched in China in 2011 and made available globally in 2018, now has more than 400 million monthly active users, Huawei says.

Huawei’s sales plunge outside China is reversing the strides it had made in markets such as western Europe.