Huawei claims AppGallery is now the third-largest app store in the world

As the Trump administration tightens its noose around Huawei, and Google signals its helplessness in the matter, Huawei is charging ahead with its hopes of becoming independent of the Android maker's influence — and more importantly, the Play Store.

The company is planning to spend up to $1 billion on courting developers to its app marketplace and has also teamed up with Xiaomi, Vivo, and OPPO in its goal of breaking the shackles of the Play Store.

In a new press release, the company is reminding the world that it can survive without Google and plans to further accelerate the development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), with AppGallery at the center of those efforts. In a further bid to lure developers onto its platform, the company also made the bold claim of having the third-largest app store in the world, second only to the Play Store and Apple App Store.

The company claims that as of 2019, AppGallery had more than 400,000 monthly users, putting in a comfortable third place behind the Play Store and Apple's marketplace. However, it must be noted that this is a distant third because while that 400K number is impressive, the Play Store had 1 billion monthly active users...all the way back in 2015. A majority of those 400K monthly users are also most likely based in Huawei's home country of China, where phones don't ship with the Play Store in general, making these numbers slightly skewed, to say the least.

As Huawei continues to build up its own ecosystem to take on Google's, the company is, in the meantime, planning to mitigate its dire situation outside of China by pre-installing some of the most popular apps on its phone before they leave the factory. The company will reportedly test this stopgap strategy with the release of the P40 next month, followed by a number of other midrange devices from the Chinese giant.