What is Huawei Mobile Services (HMS)?

Simply, it refers to a set of applications and services from Huawei for its devices’ ecosystem. HMS includes the HUAWEI AppGallery, HUAWEI Browser, HUAWEI Mobile Cloud, HUAWEI Themes, HUAWEI Music, HUAWEI Video, HUAWEI Reader, HUAWEI Assistant and more.

“Our strength lies in our own ecosystem. Consider HMS as the “brain” in our devices. In order to maximise the body’s capabilities, we need to use the brain and system in a smart way,” explained Kim So Yeon, Marketing Director at Huawei Mobile Services, Asia Pacific.

“It is a holistic and redefined operating system, designed for an all-scenario and intelligent ecosystem,” she added.

In detail, it incorporates the “1+8+N” strategy in which “1” refers to the Huawei smartphone as the center (or 1 major portal), “8” refers to extended devices including tablet, PC, watch, speaker, etc. which collectively act as a support portal and most importantly, “N” refers to the roles assumed by the developers and industry partners, hence forming a systematic “ecosystem”.

Open HMS Ecosystem

Huawei has officially opened 14 HMS Core services, including 9 essential services and 5 growth services, to provide developers with an intelligent Ecosystem with Open Capabilities and quick access to HMS Ecosystem.

To further comment on its expansive growth and reliability as a tech giant, Huawei managed to ship 110M units of devices just in the first half of the year, which is promising compared to the statistics at this same time last year.

Out of the 530M monthly active users worldwide, 30M active smartphone users are in the Asia Pacific region alone and Malaysia is leading with over 21% of the market share followed by Philippines, Thailand and Singapore all with strong growth potential.

It is thus apt to release the Mate 30 Series with the emphasis on HMS in this market.

The Huawei Mate 30 series comes pre-installed with the Huawei AppGallery, an official application distribution platform. Since its global launch in April 2018, the Huawei AppGallery has been serving more than 390 million global monthly active users in more than 170 countries and regions.

More apps have been integrating HMS core with an accumulated downloads of 180 billion within a year and the number of overseas top apps released on the Huawei AppGallery is increasing as more developers join the HMS Ecosystem. An example of app that has been integrating HMS and seeing some success from the Huawei AppGallery is SHAREit, which is a transfer tool. SHAREit was integrated in the HMS core in June and just within two months, they hit over 4M downloads. In a similar vein, Grab, the e-hailing service app, saw over 3M downloads within 3 months.

HMS together with HUAWEI third-party applications and services formed the HMS Ecosystem. As of now, the HMS Ecosystem has already attracted 1.01 million registered developers around the world with over 45,000 apps integrated with the HMS Core.

To further encourage developers to publish their apps with HMS platform, Huawei has increased its investment to $1 billion under the developer program called the “Shining Star”. This program also aims to cover the development, growth and marketing funds needed.