Google Play Store is the most popular app store for Android right now. But Chinese smartphone giants like Xiaomi, OPPO, & Vivo want to change this. They have formed an alliance that allows developers outside of China to upload their apps on all of their individual app stores simultaneously. This is a big move aimed at breaking Google’s dominance in the Android app store domain.
Together, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei made up for a total of 40% of smartphone shipments in Q4 2019. So if they can come up with a unified platform granting access to all of their individual apps stores, they could possibly lure in a lot of new developers. According to Statista, the Google Play Store had nearly 3 million apps here back in December 2019. So the app store is already pretty crowded, making it immensely hard for new apps to stand out.
They are calling it the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA). The official description of the alliance according to their website is as follows.
The Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA) is committed to providing one-stop services including content distribution, development support, marketing operation, brand promotion and traffic monetization to global developers . These services help developers improve their brand awareness, and obtain a large number of high-quality users and traffic monetization. Our services have covered nine countries and regions such as India, Indonesia, Russia, and Malaysia. GDSA is looking forward to working with extraordinary developers to move forward together and achieve win-win cooperation.
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The alliance will act as a support system for global developers across different stages of app development and monetizing. Currently, it covers nine regions such as India, Indonesia, Russia, and Malaysia. Interestingly, the official website only lists Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo as the official alliance members of the GDSA. However, the report from Reuters mentioned Huawei too as a member of the alliance. All four companies are yet to confirm their membership.
Google’s dominance in this market allows it to collect as much as 30% commission on sales made on its app store. So this alliance could lure in developers by offering better incentives and charging less commission. Also, their apps will be available across all the participating member app stores, significantly increasing its exposure across users in the nine regions covered by this service.
While we are yet to confirm Huawei’s membership in the GDSA alliance, we know the company is desperately trying to create an alternative to the Play store. The company lost access to Google Play services and hence access to the app store after the US banned Google from selling its software services to the company. So joining this alliance could be the fastest way to create a viable Play Store alternative for its international users.
It’s also worth mentioning that Huawei is also investing heavily to bring developers on board its app store. The company has offered upwards of $1 billion to global developers to develop and publish apps on its own app store called the Huawei AppGallery.
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