It seems that Huawei is gearing up to have Android’s most popular apps available on their own proprietary app store known as the App Gallery.

In an email seen by XDA Developers, Huawei is requesting developers to publish their apps on the AppGallery, “In order to guarantee a smooth usage of your App for our users, Huawei is committed to provide you with full support, to help you publish your App into AppGallery.”

This is not surprising and Huawei is not the first company to personally ask individual developers to publish apps on their store, Amazon has done it before. However, the timing raises questions as to whether Huawei has already started moving on past Android and the Google Play Store.

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Following Trump’s directive to ban U.S. companies from trading with Huawei, we have seen a number of suppliers pull their partnership with Huawei, the latest being Facebook revoking Huawei’s license to pre-install its apps on devices.

There have been rumours that Huawei is working on its own proprietary Operating Software, chances are the new OS will be based on AOSP (the open source version of Android), which will allow it to run Android apps and thus would explain the push to have Android’s popular apps published on their own store.

Prior to this new push by Huawei, it was believed that the company was working with Aptoide to have them include their app store as the default option on Huawei devices, however, following this new move, it seems that Huawei now prefers to have everything in-house.

Subject: [OFFICIAL] Invitation to join Huawei AppGallery

Cher XXX team,

In the last 2 years, Huawei shipped over 350M phones, about half of them in western markets.

All Huawei phones have our official AppStore “AppGallery” preloaded globally, with 270 million monthly active users.

We realized that your great Android App XXX is not yet published in our AppGallery.

In order to guarantee a smooth usage of your App for our users, Huawei is committed to provide you with full support, to help you publish your App into AppGallery.

We would therefore like to invite you to join our 560k developers community for free, in our Huawei Developer portal.

If Huawei is actually successful in convincing developers to publish on the AppGallery, then the transition between the current version on Android running on Huawei devices and the new OS that the company might be working on will be smoother than analysts thought.