When the U.S. trade restrictions hit Huawei in 2019, most international app developers quietly stopped supporting the platform. Without Google Mobile Services, the easy path — list on Play Store, ship — disappeared. Huawei users became second-class citizens of the mobile internet.
That's tens of millions of phones in Southeast Asia alone, including a substantial portion of our potential users in Malaysia. So when we started designing A9Today, we made an early decision: Huawei support isn't an afterthought, it's a Tier-1 platform alongside Android and iOS.
What 'native Huawei support' actually means
It's not enough to ship an APK and call it done. Real Huawei support means:
- No Google Play Services dependencies. Push notifications, location, in-app payments — all of it works without GMS.
- HarmonyOS first-class testing. We test every release on HarmonyOS 2.0+, not just EMUI.
- Direct download distribution. Users get the latest APK from a9playmy8.com — no AppGallery approval cycle slowing us down.
- OTPQ integration without GCM. Verification codes work over our own infrastructure.
The technical pieces
Replacing Google Mobile Services means rebuilding several pieces yourself or finding alternatives:
| GMS feature | Our replacement |
|---|---|
| Firebase Cloud Messaging | Self-hosted WebSocket + OTPQ push fallback |
| Google Play in-app billing | Direct payment integration with local Malaysian banks |
| Google Sign-In | OTPQ-verified phone number authentication |
| Google Maps | Not needed for our use case |
Was it worth it?
Yes. Roughly 18% of our active Malaysian user base is on Huawei devices. If we'd treated them as a fallback, we'd have written off nearly a fifth of the market. Instead, those users have an experience that's identical to Android and iOS — which translates into the highest retention rate of any platform in our analytics.
If the platform you build for excludes a significant portion of your audience, you're not building for them. You're building for the easy half.
If you're a Huawei user reading this: thank you for sticking with the brand. We see you, and we built this for you.