Earlier this week, Huawei held its Malaysia Ecosystem Conference alongside with the event, officially announced the availability of its Mate 30 series in Malaysia. During the conference, the brand spoke at length about its plans without Google Mobile Services (GMS) and move on with a focus on its own Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).
In Malaysia, Huawei announced that Malaysia would be part of its Shining Star Program. Through that program, the company also introduced the HMS Integration Challenge, a contest that rewards app developers that can integrate and localised both new and currently existing apps into the HMS ecosystem.
To ensure that developers are not left in the lurch, Huawei has ensured that HMS has been made to be as familiar as possible to both app developers and users. To that end, it will provide them with the necessary tools to help expedite the integration process of their apps into HMS.
Getting developers to integrate their apps into the HMS is undoubtedly going to be a challenge for Huawei. In order to make it worth their while, the company is incentivising the entire process; it’s set aside US$1 billion dollars (~RM4.19 billion) to the initiative, which is then allocated towards a development fund, a user growth fund, and a marketing fund.  The development fund is the focus for app developers as, from the looks of it, it’s where the Shining Star Program and HMS Integration Challenge will be deriving most of their funding from.
To date, Huawei claims that it has 45000 apps already integrated into its HMS. Listed below are just some of the local companies that have successfully managed to integrate their apps into the ecosystem:
- Astro Awani
- Caring
- Malaysia Airlines
- My Astro
- The Star
- Tonton
- RHB Now
- Fave
- XOX
- Pulse
Huawei kicked off its HMS Integration Challenge on 23 September this year and will conclude its duration on 31 December 2019. As mentioned in an earlier report, Huawei is making the challenge something of a time-sensitive objective; developers that can complete the integration of their apps before the end of this month will receive a rewards package worth RM500000. For those that complete the task by the end of November get RM300000, while those that are only able to integrate their apps into HMS by the end of December will receive RM100000.
