It’s no secret that Huawei is having a bad time. Thanks to sanctions implemented against the company by the US in early 2019, it was forced to find alternatives to Google. This includes Google’s Play Store — an app many can’t fathom living without. Where do you get your apps, then?

Huawei has been hard at work bulking up its own AppGallery store, adding as many local apps as possible before the release of its P40 lineup of devices. We need access to critical apps like Facebook, Twitter, Insta and Spotify too. What do these have in common? They’re US-based. And, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that these apps (and a bunch more) can’t be listed in Huawei’s app store.

Get more apps

We’ve been using the Huawei Mate 30 Pro for a while, and the biggest challenge, by far, is getting critical apps on the device. This has led us to sideload apps from third-party app stores, which can be a pain if you don’t know what you’re doing. Now, Huawei wants to streamline this process.

The company is testing an app called AppSearch, which is kind of like Google Search meets AppGallery. AppSearch will permit users to search for ‘officially’ unsupported apps, and download them from those sources.

We should note that neither Huawei nor AppSearch actually provides the APKs users will download. Instead, it sources them from other places like Amazon’s App Store, APKMirror, the app’s official site if they provide an APK there or Huawei AppGallery if it’s there. In other words, Huawei doesn’t take any responsibility for the security and integrity of those APKs, which may pose a security risk to your device. But hey, you don’t have to sideload anything.

Huawei is currently testing AppSearch in Germany, specifically aimed at devices that don’t have access to Google’s suite of apps. We don’t know when (or if) this will roll out to the rest of the world. There is speculation that Huawei will announce the functionality with the launch of its P40 devices this week.