HMS, which stands for Huawei Mobile Services, was created as an alternative to GMS (Google Mobile Services). This was really the start of an evolution.
Why Was It Created As An Alternative?
If you have been following and observing trends in the global tech industry, you’d know that Huawei has been put under a lot of pressure over the past year. In May 2019, the US government issued a ban on this tech company and its subsidiaries.
As a result of this ban, Huawei could no longer do business with its American counterparts. For several years, this Chinese tech company launched its products with Google Mobile Services (GMS), but the ban prevented them from doing any major business deal.
This was very disruptive because Google is the soul of most android smartphones in the market. Not having GMS means that Huawei users will miss out on Google products and services, including cloud-based services such as YouTube, Google Map, Photos, Google Chrome, Google Play Store, etc. and some popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
This isn’t even including the small apps that depend on GMS structure.
What Could Huawei Do?
The only way they could weather the storm was to create an alternative and competitive platform- the Huawei Mobile Services, otherwise known as the HMS.
HMS hit the spotlight and got global attention when Honor 9X Pro, Honor View 30 Pro, and other phones were launched into the market.
What Does The HMS Do?
Brilliant question.
It simply serves as an alternative platform that replaces Google Apps on Honor and Huawei phones. So, see it as Huawei doing for its phone’s users and developers what Google does for most smartphones.
Now, the HMS has two components. There is the HMS Core, which developers use as a toolkit to create apps and the user-component which includes App Gallery and other Huawei services. HMS core thrives on three components- Growth, development, and monetization.
From 2019, there have been massive improvements in the HMS core. For instance, HMS 4.0 released in February 2020, launched into the market and opened a whole new door of possibilities- it came with facial recognition, text detection, classification of images and pictures, detecting and tracking objects, etc.
HMS 5.0 was launched in May 20020 with enhanced audio control and graphics. It also supported apps running on augmented reality. There are so many kits on the platform that enhance open development. They include: Push kit, account kit, analytics kit, game services, and location kit, map kit, etc.
What of the App Gallery?
The major competitor of Huawei’s App Gallery is Google’s Play Store. The App Gallery is available in 75 languages and 170 countries. The number of developers creating apps for the App Gallery has increased in a short amount of time, almost reaching a million.
Seven key services have direct competitors on the Google Play Store. They include Cloud, Huawei ID, Themes, Browser, Assistant, etc.
HMS has over 600 million monthly users, spanning over 168 countries.
