Huawei is finally opening up its wearables to third-party apps

Although Huawei’s smartphone business is struggling in the face of continued US sanctions, the company is doing fairly well in the wearables space. Last year, while its smartphone business saw a 42.4% year-over-year decline in shipments, its smartwatch shipment volume jumped 90% year-over-year in China and Asia and 50% globally. As a result, on the one hand, Huawei is reportedly looking to scale down smartphone production this year; on the other, the company is opening up its wearables to third-party apps to further boost sales.

For the unaware, Huawei’s smartwatches run LiteOS — a proprietary software that currently doesn’t support third-party apps. However, starting today, the company is opening up its wrist wearables ecosystem to third-party developers in a bid to attract more buyers. As a proof of concept, the company has released the popular fitness app “Fitify” for the Watch GT 2 Pro.

Huawei has also announced that it is willing to work with independent developers and brands to bring their apps over to its growing portfolio of wearables. In a statement on the matter, Derek Yu, VP Huawei CEE & Nordic at Huawei Consumer Business Group, said, “We are already the global market leader for wearables quickly gaining market share for the category across many geographies. In Q3 2020, we shipped 10.7 million wrist wearable products globally, growing 88.1& year-on-year to a market share of 19.5%. By making Fitify our debut third-party app for our wearable products we are sending a message to the many other high quality app developers. Our wearables are becoming incredibly popular, and you can benefit by being part of the Huawei AppGallery and wearables ecosystem.”

To further attract developers, Huawei plans to offer a one-stop, full-spectrum operational support solution for all app content providers, covering the entire cycle from ideation, development, and distribution to operation and data analytics. The company has also developed unique integration kits to help developers maximize the AppGallery listing for their apps.

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