Huawei has been working to give its smartphone users the best experience possible even when Google services are not available. Their AppGallery is pretty good, but it still lacks some of the most popular apps found in the Play Store. Now, Huawei has teamed up with OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi to create the Global Developer Service Alliance or GDSA, to allow developers outside of China to upload an app once and have it show up in the app stores of the four companies at the same time.

Four out of the six top OEMs that made up nearly 40% of all smartphone shipments in the last quarter of 2019 are now part of an alliance that could challenge Google’s Play Store.

The GDSA platform provides unified access to multiple mobile phone manufacturers’ stores. Developers can submit applications (including Android free-to-install applications, games, music, movies, books, magazines, or other digital content or services through the registration platform), which can be synchronized to multiple mobile phone manufacturers’ app stores that have already cooperated.

This new initiative would make it easier for developers to market their apps in foreign markets, even though they don’t seem to have the intention of directly competing against Google’s Play Store. The guys over at Android Authority contacted Xiaomi, and they stated that:

The Global Developer Service Alliance solely serves to facilitate the uploading of apps by developers to respective app stores of Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo simultaneously. There’s no competing interest between this service and Google Play Store.

The alliance was planning on launching this new platform in March, but we still don’t know if it may also be affected by the coronavirus threat. Once launched, the GDSA would be available in at least nine countries, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, and more.

Source Reuters

Via Andoid Authority