back to article Where the hell Huawei? It should be a bit easier to tell now the AppGallery has its first proper navigation app

Huawei is in a fraught battle to narrow the app gap between its homegrown AppGallery and the ubiquitous Google Play Store. Progress has been steady, signing up the likes of Snapchat, Microsoft and, most recently, navigation tool Here WeGo. Here WeGo has long been the third-party maps app of choice, featuring prominently on …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HSBC

    I wonder whether the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking corporation will do a banking app for Huawei?

    1. WolfFan Silver badge

      Re: HSBC

      They’re pirates. The only banks I know of which are nearly as bad are CIBC and Scotiabank and Barclays. Not even Hells Cargo is as bad. Evil, that’s them.

  2. mark l 2 Silver badge

    I for one hope that Huawei can make their app store a viable competitor for Google Play. If I were an app developer I would certainly look to submit my apps to the Huawei store and Amazon's as well as there is so much competition on Google Play that it would actually make sense to try and target the smaller app stores.

    But some apps heavily depend on Google Play services to work and without that being available on Huawei phones some apps would need to be recoded to work.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      >If I were an app developer I would certainly look to submit my apps to the Huawei store and Amazon's as well as there is so much competition on Google Play

      Checkout https://www.appinchina.co/ - commission in China (especially for games) is huge though.

      Probably other similar companies, but it's the easiest way to get into the top 20 app stores (including Huawei App Market - different beast to Gallery). It's a billion user market - practically none of whom use Amazon or Google Play.

      1. katrinab Silver badge
        Unhappy

        I doubt that any of those billion users are interested in bus times in a medium sized town in the South East of England.

        There's lots of apps that as a category are very important for smartphone users. The individual apps within that category won't get that many users because they target a small population, but they are very important for people within that population.

  3. Tubz Silver badge

    Doesn't matter if they reach app parity with GMS, the question of trusting those apps will linger unless they stamp out dodgy apps and I suspect that will not be high on their list of things to do.

    1. dirtygreen

      "Doesn't matter if they reach app parity with GMS, the question of trusting those apps will linger unless they stamp out dodgy apps and I suspect that will not be high on their list of things to do."

      That kind of implies that you do trust Google. I certainly don't and won't have google play store on my mobile. But admittedly f-droid has less on it.

    2. Snorlax Silver badge

      @Tubz

      ..unless they stamp out dodgy apps...

      lol, you haven’t been on the Google Play Store have you? Stamping out dodgy apps doesn’t seem to be high on Google’s list of things to do either...

  4. the Jim bloke
    Stop

    Here Wego crippled on android phones

    Here We Go was my preferred navigation app for a few years, but recently, six months maybe, maybe longer, it has not been able to get a satellite fix for navigation.

    just sits there with a message saying "waiting for GPS position" or somesuch. I have checked permissions, and re installed but no improvement. Meanwhile, Google maps is accessing GPS quite happily and presenting routes past highlighted advertisers and paying sponsors....

    If I wasnt noticing an odour of rat, I would be requesting a COVID-19 test..

    1. fuzzie

      Re: Here Wego crippled on android phones

      That's happened to me, occasionally, but can't say it's ever borked itself permanently. Usually fixed by killing the app and restarting in. The cases where I experienced it were like driving out of basement parking, which had no GPS signal, into the open and there it seemed to not realise GPS had become available.

    2. ThatOne Silver badge

      Re: Here Wego crippled on android phones

      > not been able to get a satellite fix for navigation

      Is your device antique (>1 year old)?

      In this case it might be due to the GPS week number rollover, which happened in April 2019, borking older GPS devices which hadn't anticipated it.

      Some of mine don't get a fix at all anymore, some only get intermittent ones. On my old phone for instance, it now finds and loses all GPS sats every 2-3 seconds: On, off, on, off. Some apps can work with that (with less resolution), other apps are totally lost. My car GPS works part time too: GPS fix for a while, no fix for another while, "while" having values of seconds to hours. Obviously the day this happened I was driving through an unknown part of the country, and it lost fix for half a day...

  5. Steve Graham

    "utterly feature-crippled, only supporting offline navigation"

    That's the exact reverse of my point of view. Google Maps, for example, only really works if you have an internet connection. If you don't, well, you can't even tell if you're up shit creek or not. (You can cache areas in the Google app, but they evaporate automatically after a short time. Got to renew the snooping.)

    I prefer a navigation app which is pre-loaded with maps of the places I'm travelling around.

    1. fuzzie

      Re: "utterly feature-crippled, only supporting offline navigation"

      The offline maps/navigation saved my butt big time once. I was travelling, and SIM roaming wasn't working. Google Maps, specifically, but even other Google apps with vague location features all were stuck waiting for location services. The fused location bits seem to require GSM data and Wifi, despite having GPS, to work.

      With Here WeGo I could use the pre-loaded maps, on-device search and the GPS pin location to get around. Depending on city, you even get public transport/transit navigation all offline.

      Admittedly, it's points of interest aren't as up to date as Google's, but then Here doesn't slurp the world for a living. Fun fact: Here provides 80% of in-care navigation systems so they're not that niche, just less visible than Google and Apple.

      1. Tom Chiverton 1

        Re: "utterly feature-crippled, only supporting offline navigation"

        See also Map.ME for a good hybrid

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "utterly feature-crippled, only supporting offline navigation"

      Indeed, not sure the reporter knows his apps. Google maps only works online unless you download your chosen map tile for offline use. Even then, it self deletes after a month.

      Sygic - Slovakia, Tom Tom - Dutch, Maps.me - German. Those are 3 significant alternatives not impacted by US sanctions. Others are available. Any one of them would love to become the app of choice in a billion strong market. Google maps would be my least favoured option.

      "...this news is indicative of the ongoing woes of Huawei" - really? Is that factual reporting or you trying to mould a perception?

    3. southen bastard

      Re: "utterly feature-crippled, only supporting offline navigation"

      maps me works off line quite well, no snooping

  6. Barry Rueger

    Less Google is a selling point

    Even if you ignore the global mega - issues with Google, the sad fact is that their products are often just not very good.

    Maps, and Drive, and Docs, and Search may be ubiquitous, but none of them is particularly pleasant to use, with UI design that defies both logic and intuition, and Google 's habit of deprecating features at an inexplicable whim

    The Play store is among the worst of Google products, and I genuinely dread trying to find an app to do some simple job. Between a rating system that seems to be copied from Yelp, and which is plagued with obvious spam and astroturf, and apps with so much advertising that they border on useless, I would love to see a properly curated app store with one or two really good apps iin a category nstead of dozens of utterly crap ones.

    Our Huawei phones are excellent hardware, and have pretty decent software. I'll sign up for their app store in an instant.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Barry Rueger - Re: Less Google is a selling point

      Actually having your personal information sent to China is not a bad thing if you live in the Western world. You will be of no interest for their ad companies and the Chinese government can't reach you so you will be left alone.

      That's what you could call Nirvana!

  7. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "Huawei has earmarked over $1bn to bolster its own app platform"

    And so it continues. Through the blind stupidity of the greatest orange moron on the planet, Chinese companies are forced to build themselves up and create their own ecosystem, instead of inserting themselves into the Western ecosystem.

    I am not an economist, but even I can see that it would be much better for Western economies to have Chinese companies continue to be subservient and not become deciders, but that is what is happening.

    The Dragon is waking up. Now is the time. In the coming years, people will come to see that Trump has handed China the excuse it needed to become a dominant economic power. Little by little, it will be China deciding standards, it will be China setting examples and innovating. Think different ? They're Chinese, they do that by definition.

    Then US (and Western) companies will by crying over their lost market influence, about how it's not fair and they should be given subsidies to survive.

    Yep, well, too late for that. The beginning of the Fall of Western Influence has happened, and thy name is Trump.

    1. Barry Rueger

      Re: "Huawei has earmarked over $1bn to bolster its own app platform"

      Chinese companies are forced to build themselves up and create their own ecosystem,

      They've already done that. Because Google has not been available other China based companies have stepped up and created a mobile phone based system that US companies can only dream of.

      Everyone pays for everything using their phones, and WeChat and other companies are how pretty much everyone connects to the economy, and to each other.

      The US really needs to get over the belief that a lack of Google equals a backwards country. If anything it ' the Americans who are playing catch-up.

  8. thrd

    Did they read the dev agreement?

    I wonder if they read the developer agreement before putting the app there or if they were allowed an exception?

    Because it contains such wonderful nuggets such as:

    > You may not use GPL or any other open source software of the similar nature.

    1) Completely vague conditions ("similar nature") that you are fully liable on.

    2) Not even getting the name of the license properly

    3) Not even proper grammar

    Sure, I have full confidence to agree with that. Interesting strategy for "winning developers" there.

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