[antome]

The problem is that the play store is a monopoly. If neither Amazon nor Samsung can create an app store with even a small fraction of the total useful apps found on the play store, who can? And if you can't find one particular app on the Amazon/Samsung store, why bother at all?

[cobookman]

They can create an app store on Android. Nobody is stopping them.

The same can't be said for ios

[eridan2]

They can create an Android Store. But many apps depends on Google APIs or applications (Maps, Drive, Contacts, etc) and will require changes.

[benatkin]

Huawei could make a UI toolkit similar to iOS, and use the Swift open source project, and encourage developers to port their iOS apps.

[throwayEngineer]

This seems like an expensive risky overkill to trust Apple, when JavaScript solutions work on every platform.

[Theodores]

Times change. Why build an app and have an app store if you can do it with a PWA?

There is only one 'killer app' on my phone - WhatsApp. I need my phone to access that through a PC and therefore need the app.

Years ago I had a lot more apps, nowadays I am 'meh' and never visit the Play Store. Anecdotal, but, as mentioned, PWA has arrived and that means that an app store is not strictly needed like how it was before HTML5 arrived.

[vbezhenar]

Google App Store is not a monopoly. You can build Android-based OS with your own store. Google spend some resources attracting developers. Huawei can do the same. May be even attract some exclusive software.