Huawei, the Shenzhen-based telecommunication infrastructure provider and world’s second-largest smartphone vendor, has launched public tests in China for applications integrating its Huawei Mobile Service (HMS) on Monday, local tech news site IThome reported.
As an alternative to Google’s GMS (Google Mobile Services), HMS offers a set of basic mobile applications and services for Huawei’s smartphones including phone calls, short messaging service (SMS), message notification, identity verification, and QR code scanning. It was first introduced in mid-September with the launch of flagship smartphone Mate 30.
HMS comes with some bug fixes and performance improvements. Some new features have been added to services including Huawei account, in-app purchases, message notifications, and mobile wallets, to provide more stable services with higher quality.
HMS Core Test is a small-sized model of the application store, which integrates the download and installation of apps based on six basic HMS service kits, including Game, Fido&Safety, Purchase, Identity, Scan, and Nearby. Huawei released two applications for the public tests—Huawei Mobile Services and HMS Core Test. The latest version of Huawei Mobile Serviced ML (Machine Learning).
The company has built up an HMS ecosystem by combining HMS with HUAWEI third-party applications, covering a wide range of services including music, video, map, and email. The HMS ecosystem has attracted over 1 million registered developers globally, and more than 45,000 applications worldwide have already been integrated with HMS capabilities and services as of August 2019.
Huawei has expanded its own ecosystem of mobile services after the Trump administration placed the company and dozens of its affiliates on an entity list in May, which banned the company from using services from Google and other US-based firms without permission from the government.
This new move on HMS will speed up the application of Huawei’s self-developed HarmonyOS on smartphones. Debuted in August, the open-source operating system is designed to integrate with a range of smart devices including smartphones, wearables, TVs, and speakers.
