Kathy Gibson reports from virtual Huawei Connect – Having been excluded from pre-loading many US-built applications and services on its mobile devices, Huawei has made quick progress in building its own ecosystem.
Zhang Ping’an, president: consumer cloud service at Huawei consumer business group, says the decision was made in May 2019 to develop Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).
“We realised we need to develop our own application service system, so we could continue to drive intelligent experience software to the Huawei device user.
“Building a new mobile services system is difficult, but we think we will be able to achieve our goal.”
Ping’an says HMS today boasts five payment services, an advertising service platform, browsing service, map applications with navigation, and search.
He is particularly encouraged by the mapping engine, which has been built from scratch and is already integrated with more than 3 000 applications.
“With HMS, our goal is to enable partners in the ecosystem,” he says.
Huawei recently launched HMS Core 5.0, a fully-integrated system that brings together, hardware, software and cloud capabilities.
HMS Core 5.0 gives developers the tools they need to build apps, graphics, media, systems and services for smart devices.
In the last year, the number of developers working on HMS has more than doubled to more that 8-miilio, and 96 000 apps have been integrated with HMS Core.
“We decided to make an all-out effort for our survival a year ago,” Ping’an explains. “At that time, we mobilised thousands of engineers to build the HMS Core. Since then, it has lifted and blossomed, with new developers signing up every day, and new apps being launched to provide a richer ecosystem.
“HMS is now the world’s third-largest app ecosystem.”
The HMS Core 5.0 offers developers a number of features that will help them build applications for finance, business, government and education users.
When it comes to finance, Ping’an explains that dedicated hardware and operating system features enable fingerprint and facial recognition to ensure the security of transactional data.
For government, the Huawei City Service works with municipalities to provide government services for mobile users.
Education is a major push for Huawei, and during the pandemic it launched its Link Now service for online education and office collaboration.
Link Now offers one-to-one and one-to-many communication and creates an important platform for app developers.
Huawei Enterprise Manager allows for the management of tablets, smartphones and wearables within the enterprise ecosystem.
Huawei AI Pass works with short range wireless communication to give users access to various services.