Meet AppGallery from Huawei: one of the top 3 global app distribution platforms. AppGallery offers a wide variety of global and local apps across categories including navigation and transport, news, social media, finance, entertainment, and others. It’s available in more than 170 countries and regions with over 580 million global monthly active users and 6 million registered developers. Although it was originally built into Huawei’s devices ecosystem, AppGallery welcomes players from everywhere and works across all Android devices, making it one of the most exciting app marketplaces for developers today.*

In this four-piece series, we dive into why AppGallery is a solid choice for developers and gamers and what benefits are waiting for you on the platform. If you missed our first article, you can find it here.

The dream of becoming a game developer

Did your dream to become a game developer start with an extraordinary passion? For example, you might have encountered a fantastic game that inspired you to create the next big thing in gaming. Arguably, there are countless reasons for getting into gaming. 

Whatever passion we might have for developing games, it needs to sit alongside reality. A developer might spend time creating characters with superpowers, which is often what their family and friends think they do; they may hit the jackpot because they were lucky and talented enough, to develop a fantastic game, which is what some parts of society think; or they may have to fend off criticism of gamers who want to know why it takes ages to fix or develop a new game.

But the reality of being a game developer is somewhere in-between. Of course, everyone wants to develop the next Mario Kart. But in the meantime, most of your working hours are probably spent fixing stuff, writing lines of code or optimising PNGs that don’t fit into the plan. 

Developers must keep hold of reality because the fact is that each game they develop is a small fish in a giant pond of 3 million other fish. 

That is the number of Android apps that one game must compete with. What’s more, the average user has less than 200 apps on their phone, the majority of which they don’t even use daily. It means that 99.99% of apps simply don’t make it to the party.

The reality of commercialising games

This imbalance creates a user acquisition war in the gaming sector and pushes the cost of acquiring customers exponentially higher yearly.  Even if you accept these growing costs, there is still the challenge of customer retention.

Faced with this scenario, you have a couple of challenges. How can your game find a bigger audience on a different platform and realise improved in-app revenue? There are no straightforward answers but some options are emerging. Perhaps one increasingly bigger opportunity sits with AppGallery. Our store has 580 million monthly active users globally, and 45 million of them are in Europe. 

Comparing 2022 to 2021, AppGallery increased downloads by 26%, in-app revenue raised by 6 million and monthly ads revenue by 4.2x. How are we doing this? We have a high-spending audience, with an average ARPU of $207. This is revenue that game developers can potentially tap into.

Figure 1. Monthly ads revenue growth comparing 2022 to 2021

The second challenge is how you onboard your app or game onto a new platform. This can seem like a daunting prospect, but with AppGallery it is easy. Android games can be ready in a few days,  depending on how complex the game is. We support every game with solutions, local teams and dedicated business hubs to help with the onboarding process. This makes integrating new games and working with developer partners as seamless as possible. They have access to specialist developer kits, which for gaming companies means improved and rapid distribution of games to the widest possible audience and all the tools needed to market games and increase user and revenue numbers. Though there are limitations with Google Play, AppGallery operates across all Android devices, providing extra opportunities for user acquisition and growth for developers on the platform. 

Benefitting from the Huawei ecosystem

And that’s not all, because Huawei is not just a store or a platform, it’s an entire, connected ecosystem that can build powerful storytelling around a game or an app.  We deploy promotional banners and a whole range of ads across our pre-loaded core apps on Huawei devices, we offer fantastic deals for users, and we can promote our games through events, PR and social media. We highlight all the features and benefits to encourage engagement and build our community in cooperation with our developer partners.   

As if this were not enough, we also have a fully-fledged system to monitor every interaction with a game. This allows developers to take advantage of a non-saturated channel to achieve a return on ad-spend in an average of just 12 days and lowers the unit cost of advertising.

We would always advocate a realistic approach to game development, but we see no reason why developers should have their passion squashed by the need to commercialise games and realise

revenue. We can use our expertise to do this for, and with, them, helping with activation, monetisation and retention. 

But don’t take our word for it. As Borut Vovk, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Outfit7, said: “A great game is only part of the success. What Huawei provides is the rest of it, with boosted revenue, greater customer retention and higher install numbers for their games”. 

AppGallery is just the tip of the iceberg that is part of a wider ecosystem. In our next article, we’ll explain more about Petal Ads, Huawei’s dedicated mobile ad platform and how, thanks to its unique on-device AI advertising, it has helped developers tap into 730 million high-quality monthly active customers.

*Non-Huawei Android users can get AppGallery in 3 simple steps: First, download AppGallery from its website, then install HMS Core app available in AppGallery. Finally, choose “Log in to HUAWEI ID” to register for HUAWEI ID account, by tapping on the “Me” button at the right bottom of AppGallery home page.