AppGallery – is Huawei brand app store for Android and Harmony OS devices. In fact, this is nothing else but an alternative to Google Play, and a third most popular apps distribution platform globally, after Google Play and AppStore.
In 2019 Google banned installation of Google Mobile Services in Huawei smartphones. Currently, Huawei operating system is an AOSP (Android Open Source Project) with HMS (Huawei Mobile Services) installed instead of Google services.
To upload the application to AppGalley it shall be adapted to this platform first. This was the reason for Huawei turning to us for assistance.
DIXY app was closely centered around Google services. These services included analytics, maps, geolocations, deep links, push-notifications. To tackle the problem our engineers first had to analyze how deeply Google services were integrated into the application code, and after that, select the appropriate kits, libraries from Huawei and fully replace the services.
Project implementation stages:
- Implementation of Yandex.Analytics
- Implementation of push-notifications
- Replacement of cartography and location-based services and clustering data on maps
- Dynamic referencing
- Replacement of QR-code scanner
- Testing and stabilizing of the application
The following was replaced:
- Firebase Push Notifications were replaced with HMS Push Kit
- Google Maps were replaced with HMS Map Kit
- Firebase Deep Linking was replaced with HMS Deep Linking
- Google ML Kit was replaced with Zxing
The challenges we faced
During the first stage the developers started to develop the Flutter 1 based application. However, this prevented us from using the newest Huawei libraries which turned out to be incompatible with this platform and were tailored to Flutter 2. This resulted in the incompatibility problems.
We quickly reorganized the process and notified our Huawei partners hereof. Huawei got down to fixing the problem.
Moreover, another issue was the need to make testing on “clean” Huawei phones free from any Google services. This has proved to be quite challenging in Russia. The point is that “clean” phones can show the bugs that couldn’t be identified on devices with installed Google services. But we successfully tackled this problem due to Huawei support. Huawei promptly sent us the needed “clean” phones
Finally, the app was published in AppGallery. It took us no more than 2 months to cope with the task.
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