It has been several months since HUAWEI launched a smartphone in India, and HONOR launched the HONOR 9X in January, but with old Kirin 710 SoC and Android Pie. This is due to ban on using Google Play Services on its phones. Now a new report says that it will soon partner with India’s system apps company OSLabs, the maker of IndusOS, to offer a curated Android app store on HUAWEI and HONOR smartphones.
IndusOS’s app store, App Bazaar, has more than 400,000 regional apps in 12 local languages — such as Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, besides English.
The company has already introduced HUAWEI AppGallery, an alternative to Google Play Store in Europe, and is using HUAWEI Mobile Services (HMS), which is an alternative to Google Mobile Services (GMS).
HUAWEI is also strengthening its own app store, HMS or Huawei Mobile Services, globally. In India, it started talks with 150 top app developers in India to get them on its app store and is offering an incentive of up to $20,000 on the integration of apps with HMS in India through its $1-billion global fund, says the report.