Surely before taking advantage of that spectacular offer from Huawei‘s latest success you have considered two things. The first is if you have a version of Android licensed with the Play Store and the second, if not, is like installing Apps on a Huawei mobile without Google services . This tutorial gives you the answer to your questions.
That a Chinese brand smartphone does not have GMS or the Play Store does not mean that you cannot install all kinds of Apps. That is why the brand has been working so much on its App Gallery, which allows the installation of an infinity of applications on the models “capped” by the US order. It is even possible to install apps from Google itself , although with a slight “catch”.
Install apps like WhatsApp on a Huawei mobile without GMS
All we need to install apps on Huawei mobiles is the brand’s own store, App Gallery. Here you will find the majority of Apps available to Install such as the Play Store. So far, zero complications.
However, not all the apps we look for are present in the App Gallery and this is where Petal Search comes into play. This is a search engine that is responsible for crawling the Internet to find the official APKs of the apps that we are trying to locate in order to download and install them from its official site. This is the case of WhatsApp.
To install this type of Apps, access the Huawei app Gallery and enter the name of the app in question in the search. As you can see, when entering WhatsApp, the app itself does not appear, but the first result encourages us to download the messaging program from the service’s own official website. Click on it and the mobile browser will open.
Now we are inside the WhatsApp page itself, not the App Gallery, and we simply have to click on the “Download now” button to download the APK of the app to our Huawei mobile, allowing the browser to install applications from unknown sources. Once downloaded, we just have to click on the “Install” button so that WhatsApp, or any other app that we install by this method, is hosted on the home screen of our mobile as it happens with phones from other brands.
How to install Google apps on Huawei phones
If you search the Huawei application store , you will not find Google apps anywhere. However, the Chinese manufacturer uses a trick from Google itself to facilitate access to its services on mobiles that do not have GMS. It’s about the Quick apps.
These quick apps consist of a new type of app that requires no installation and is compatible with more than 12 of the major Chinese mobile phone manufacturers, including Huawei. They are developed based on frontend technology and support native representation, so they have the advantages of normal applications without the need for installation.
To install Google apps on Huawei mobiles, we can use the App Gallery itself. To exemplify the processing, we are going to try to install Gmail, the Internet giant’s mail app, on a Huawei P40 Pro without Play Store or company services:
Enter the app you are looking for, Gmail in this case, in the search engine and you will see how the first result is a PWA app. Click on open now that the browser opens as we have done before with WhatsApp. At this time you must accept the conditions of use of the Quick Apps by clicking on the Next button.
This will take us directly to the Gmail Quick App but Huawei has an “Ace up its sleeve” to be able to use it as a normal app. The browser interface itself encourages you to install the app on the phone’s home screen to access it as if it were a classic app. Click on the 3-dot button located in the upper right corner, select Add to Main Screen and, in the new window, select Add.
As you can see, this will create an icon with an identification that it is a Quick App that will allow you to access Google mail, although in a somewhat more limited way and with fewer functions.