After the US sanctions imposed on it, Huawei had to abandon the pre-installation of the Google Play Store on its smartphones and had to deepen its application system. But the latter can still alienate users, from a practical and security point of view.
With Harmony OS, the unified platform for Huawei devices, we can download apps from the official store, App Gallery. But this app is very incomplete and still lacks many very popular apps like Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Waze, Microsoft Teams, Duolingo, Fitbit, etc..
If the application you are looking for is not available in the App Gallery, Petal Search, the manufacturer’s internal search engine, takes over and offers alternatives to downloading the target application by other means, in particular through their APK files.
First, the user is referred to an official source to get the popular APK file, often on the publisher’s website. In the absence of such a solution, Petal Search recommends third-party APK stores such as APKPure, APKMonk, AppParks or Uptodown.
In an interview with Digital Trends, Jaime Gonzalo, Head of Huawei Mobile Services Europe, explained that the sites all users are referred to have some form of illegality. They are all referenced by search engines and must be officially registered with an organization in Europe or the United States.
This, Jaime Gonzalo said, is that there are several systems in place to make sure an APK source is trustworthy. “We review the popularity of the site and app to assess credibility, and ensure that the latest version of the app is available on the page, as it usually contains the latest security patches. At the end of the process, we run an internal scan for malware.”
He adds that during the download, the integrity of the app is checked so that no other APK is decompiled or installed in parallel. Then the malware and virus protection starts to make sure the app doesn’t do anything unexpected, like trying to gain unauthorized access. If the AI detects a problem, the installation will be suspended automatically.
