Big Chinese challenge Google on apps

The Chinese mobile giants are ready to challenge Google and its application store. Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo are joining forces to create a platform that allows those who develop applications outside of China to publish their apps simultaneously on the stores of the four companies. This is reported exclusively by Reuters on its website.

The novelty is called the Global Developer Service Alliance (Gdsa) and aims to make it easier for developers to bring apps on the devices of the four companies, which together hold 40% of the world's smartphone sales. According to sources, the launch has been scheduled for March, but it is not clear whether it could suffer the impact of the coronavirus.

In China, where Google services are prohibited, users download applications from Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo stores, but in other markets it is the Google Play Store that dominates. The Gdsa could incentivize developers to create apps for the stores of the 4 companies, and in this way challenge the dominant position of Google.

The Gdsa "only serves to facilitate the upload of applications by developers in the respective app stores of Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo", explained Xiaomi in a note in which it does not mention Huawei and denies the challenge to Google: "There is no competitive intent between this service and the Google Play Store. "

So far, the only company that has pushed out of China on its app store - the App Gallery - is Huawei, which due to Donald Trump's ban is no longer free to install Google's applications and services on new smartphones. To grow the store, Huawei announced investments in the last September for 1 billion dollars (of which 10 million in Italy) aimed at incentivizing developers on a global scale.