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Can you get most of your favorite apps on new Huawei smartphones?

Operative word being ‘most’

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The short answer is “yes.” But there’s certainly so much more that goes into it.

By now it’s no secret that there’s something missing from Huawei’s latest flagships that we’ve all been accustomed to using. Even so, your Mate 30 or P40 still has plenty of “smart” in that smartphone. That goes beyond what you’ll find on the AppGallery.

If you hang around a lot of tech pages or blogs, you’d know exactly what’s missing. People are quick to point that out whenever stories about Huawei’s new phones come up.

You would have also probably noticed all the sponsored articles on the matter. To be clear, this particular article isn’t. The rest of the team is working on those because we gotta keep the lights on. For today, this here is more of an honest, and hopefully helpful take on the matter.

Some of their communication strategy which involves highlighting the number of apps available and how it’s now the third largest App Store, I think, is a little misguided. But that’s a conversation for another day. For now, I’ll try to answer some questions that some friends and GadgetMatch followers have asked.

What can you find on AppGallery?

A lot, it turns out. When the Huawei Mate 30 series first came out, the app selection was looking a little lean. Fast forward to a few months later and the apps you’ve come to know and love are all starting to slowly be available.

In the Philippines you already have Viber, WeChat, Lazada, SnapChat and some pretty useful ones like GCash, PayMaya, SHAREit, and Canva among others.

In Singapore, transportation and ride-hailing apps like ComfortDelgro, TADA and RYDE have already made their way to the AppGallery.

You can also find links to your favorite apps that aren’t available for direct download on AppGallery. Say for example, WhatsApp. Here’s how you can get it.

Step 1: Search Whatsapp official link in the AppGallery.

Step 2: Click on the selection that says Official download link from Whatsapp to open the link.

Step 3: Once directed to the Whatsapp official website, click download now and installation will take place immediately.

What about apps that are NOT on AppGallery?

Fun fact: There’s a wishlist section on the AppGallery where you can let Huawei know what apps you desperately want to be available. Just make sure your App Gallery is updated so you can find it.

Huawei is pouring a lot of resources to make sure ALL the apps are available on the App Gallery. They’re not there yet. However, with the company being aggressive, the growth is promising.

If you really need to get your hands on certain apps there’s a workaround. There are third-party app stores that you can get to through the phone’s browser. Sites and apps like APKPure and APKMonk provide you access to apps that may not yet be present on the App Gallery.

Personally, I’ve opted to go the APKPure route. If you’re worried about updates, APKPure actually handles that for you. Since installing some apps, I’ve consistently gotten updates that cover both new features and additional security.

Is the AppGallery secure? 

In a previous article, Huawei confidently told us, “We do not touch data. That’s a policy from top-down.” They also pointed out how they have never been caught doing anything with users’ data — that’s something that can’t be said from the likes of Google or Facebook.

Huawei also sent us a presser on how secure the App Gallery is. It talked about a four-layer threat detection. It detects malicious in-app behaviour, including activities such as eavesdropping on users, monitoring users, and taking screenshots or screen recordings without authorization. You can find more details here.

In a lot of ways, it’s similar to Google’s Play Protect and the security layers on Apple’s App Store. It’s likely not perfect, but it’s there and it will detect and deter malicious software.

Now on the US government’s accusations of Huawei working in tandem with the Chinese government to spy on its users, the company has adamantly denied this. For its part, the US hasn’t been able to provide any substantial proof to back its claim. Remember, burden of proof lies on the accuser.

The Chinese government itself is a whole other socio-political issue altogether. Until a solid link is established, Huawei probably knows about you just as much what phone makers like Apple and Samsung do. Which I would argue is much less than the amount of personal data available to the likes of Facebook or Google.

Missing Google 

Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) is far from complete. It’s missing certain essentials — one in particular is a reliable maps app. You would still have to go to the browser and search for Google Maps for something that’s actually usable.

For many Google apps, that’s your workaround. Look for it from the browser and create a shortcut on your homescreen. If this is something you can live with, well and good. But it’s hardly an ideal setup.

I rely on several Google services that have no alternatives — a lot of which are actually present even on iPhones. Two in particular are Google Cast and Google Photos. Don’t get me started with Huawei Cloud. It just isn’t the same.

Cast is fine, I imagine not a lot of people will use it. But there’s no alternative to the features and convenience of Google Photos. Unlimited photo backup with access to nearly every other device. That, to me, is irreplaceable.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place

As a regular user, I honestly am not sure what the right move here is. I would love to see HMS take-off. If they can find a way to have their services perform in a manner similar or close to what we get from GMS, that’s great. However, I’m not even sure if that’s possible.

If you’ve seen our Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro video, the retail box comes with a tagline saying “with easy access to the Google apps you use most.” Our sources say this won’t be unique to Xiaomi. We should expect new Android phones to have this tagline on retail boxes as well.

That’s a clear flex from the US Government, striking some sort of agreement with Google to have Android phone makers include this tagline. Huawei is unfairly put in a disadvantageous position. Their only fault? Being a company from China.

Huawei needs to continue selling phones so they can keep pouring resources into building up HMS. If you’re going to listen to “global” (Western, really) reviewers alone, they will tell you that they “can’t recommend” at least the Mate 30 and the P40 series because of what’s missing. That’s not entirely wrong.

However, if you’re the type who can live with some of the compromises for now, by all means, get the new Huawei flagships. Help them get HMS up to speed. Because at the rate things are going, Huawei being able to stand on its own is more likely to happen than the US letting Google work with them.

You can put GMS on the new Huawei phones. It can be quite cumbersome and isn’t a method I personally recommend, so I’m not going to tell you how. If you want to find out for yourself, you can always Google it.

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Canva teams up with SB19 to turn A’TIN’s passion into creativity

Campaign lets fans access assets, editable templates, more

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Canva Philippines has joined forces with SB19 and Sony Music Entertainment to launch the “Kaya sa Canva” campaign.

This first-of-its-kind initiative is aimed at transforming the popular Filipino boy band’s fanbase into creators by giving them access to official design assets, exclusive templates, and powerful creative tools.

That’s of course as fans have a way of creating artwork, banners, and more outputs to honor their idols.

As such, the partnership enables the A’TIN (SB19’s fanbase) to access the Canva-exclusive SB19’s Creative Hub.

This dedicated space lets fans access assets, including SB19-inspired sticker packs, custom typography, and editable templates inspired by the group.

Fans around the world will initially have access to templates for photo-booth strips, wallpapers, posters, and videos.

The campaign will then expand with Canva-exclusive assets celebrating the group’s New Era, as well as their latest single, “Lawless”.

Meanwhile, the original song “KAYA” is accompanied with an upbeat music video, doubling as a love letter to A’TIN and a masterclass in Canva’s tools.

Every visual and animation is fan-inspired, a celebration of the creativity, passion, and dedication that’s defined in the community from day one.

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Samsung’s bet on the future of connected health: Less data, more action

Inside Samsung’s plan to close the gap between your wearable and your doctor

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Here’s a paradox worth sitting with: Wearable adoption keeps climbing. A lot of people now walk around with a sensor on their wrist, tracking heart rate, sleep, steps, sometimes ECG. And yet chronic disease rates haven’t moved.

That’s the problem Dr. Hon Pak, Samsung’s Head of Digital Health globally, opened with at a recent panel on the future of connected care. More data hasn’t meant better healthcare. His diagnosis: a first-mile, last-mile issue.

The first mile is that all this wearable data rarely makes it to a doctor in any usable form. The last mile is that even when a doctor says “lose weight, eat better, move more,” that advice tends to dissolve the moment real life takes over.

Picking up kids, caring for parents, getting through a Tuesday, it’s not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that knowing and doing are two different problems.

Samsung’s answer involves three things it says connected care needs to mature: meeting people where they actually are, building enough trust that people rely on the data, and using AI to turn that data into something a person can act on rather than just look at.

The Tuesday evening problem

Karthik Poriya, Head of Product at Samsung Food, framed the everyday failure point clearly. Picture it: long day, you’re tired, staring into the fridge. You’re not reaching for the healthiest option in that moment, you’re reaching for whatever’s fastest and most satisfying.

For years, nutrition tracking has focused on logging what already happened. Poriya’s team wants to intervene right at that decision point instead, pairing Samsung Health’s underlying data (BMI, antioxidant index, glycation markers) with Samsung Food’s recipe index of roughly 40,000 dishes mapped across 34 nutrients, so a health number turns into an actual dinner suggestion rather than another stat to check later.

Dr. Pak backed this with a small, concrete example from his own family: moving leftover cheesecake out of eye-level in the fridge and putting washed, sliced carrots there instead.

Kevin Duffy, CEO of connected fitness company iFit, made a similar point about exercise. The most effective tool for sticking to a fitness plan is a personal trainer, he said, citing roughly 80% higher adherence compared to going it alone.

The problem is cost: US$100 an hour or more in a major city puts that out of reach for most people. iFit’s bet is that AI can deliver something closer to a personal trainer’s precision and motivation at a price that isn’t elitist.

Duffy pointed to three reasons his company partners with Samsung specifically: reach (Samsung hardware is already in people’s homes, on their wrists and TVs), access to the biomarker data needed to build an accurate plan, and the fact that fitness goals don’t exist in isolation from sleep and nutrition data.

Trust has to come before any of this works

None of the behavior-change ambitions matter if people don’t trust the data or the company holding it. Rohit R. L., who heads Samsung’s Technology Innovation Lab in the UK, laid out how his team approaches that.

Privacy comes first: Samsung, he said, treats itself as a custodian of user data rather than an owner of it. On top of that sits clinical validation, meaning published, peer-reviewed evidence that a feature actually works in the real world, not just in a lab.

He gave a specific example: Samsung’s ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications have been clinically validated and cleared by regulators to detect signs of atrial fibrillation. He was careful with the wording there, detect signs of, not diagnose, since that distinction matters both medically and legally.

A separate study on fall detection for elderly users turned up a more human finding. The detection algorithm worked well in testing, but in real life people don’t wear their watches around the clock, and falls don’t happen on a schedule.

Dr. Pak drew a useful comparison: nobody tells their MRI technician they’re going to fidget through the scan, but with a wearable, you don’t get to control how or when someone wears it. Real-world validation has to account for that.

On the infrastructure side, Rohit described a three-layer privacy approach: on-device protection through Samsung’s Knox security framework, GDPR-compliant data handling, and alignment with the European Health Data Space, including a decentralized clinical trial system where patient identity stays with the hospital rather than moving to Samsung’s side.

Where AI actually comes in

The most technically dense part of the discussion came from Otavio Penatti, who leads Samsung’s Health AI R&D team in Brazil.

His team works on foundation models, the same category of large-scale AI models trained on unlabeled data that underpin most of today’s popular AI systems. Trained once on a huge amount of sensor data, these models can then be fine-tuned for many specific health applications, which tends to make them more accurate than models built for a single narrow task.

Penatti’s team is training these models on wearable sensor data (PPG, ECG, accelerometer) with the goal of getting the model to, as he put it, understand the body’s own signals well enough to translate them into something useful. Longer term, he sees potential in correlating that sensor data with clinical records to flag disease risk before symptoms show up.

Dr. Pak added a striking data point from Stanford research: a foundation model trained on sleep study data was able to look at just a 24-hour window of sleep and predict risk across more than 130 different diseases.

His takeaway was that the signals for a lot of future health problems are already sitting in the data being collected today, we just don’t yet know how to read all of them.

He closed this part with a number worth sitting with. A recent American Medical Association survey found that 97% of physicians have looked at wearable data at some point. Only 15 to 16% actually use it in day-to-day practice.

The top reason cited wasn’t distrust of the data, it was that the data doesn’t plug into existing clinical workflows. That’s part of why Samsung acquired health data platform Xealth, to build a pipeline that gets wellness data into the systems doctors already use.

Five years out

Asked to look five years ahead, each panelist’s answer tracked closely to their own corner of the problem. Poriya described a proactive dietitian in your pocket, one that doesn’t wait to be asked.

Rohit pointed to connected care that clinicians actually trust and patients fully control. Penatti envisioned AI that continuously links everyday behavior to clinical outcomes, catching problems before they start. Duffy’s version was a constant personal wellness coach, sifting through the data noise to tell you exactly what to do next.

The throughline across all four answers is the same: less raw data, more action. Samsung’s panel made the case that the wearable industry has spent the last decade solving for collection, more sensors, more metrics, more dashboards, while the harder problem, turning that information into something a tired person actually does on a Tuesday night, has barely been touched.

Whether foundation models and better clinical integration actually close that gap is still an open question. But it’s clearly the one Samsung is choosing to spend its next five years on.

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Rain or shine, MOVE IT’s new commuter kit has you covered

Now available on GrabMart

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Manila weather is notoriously unpredictable during the rainy season. Clear 7 AM skies easily turn into 5 PM downpours. For motorcycle-taxi commuters, arriving at work dry is a total coin flip.

MOVE IT aims to fix this with Ride-Ready, a line of commuter essentials sold exclusively on GrabMart.

The collection features a packable rain jacket, a helmet liner scarf or cap, and a refresh kit with alcohol spray, cooling wipes, and tissues.

Addressing rider concerns

Motorcycle-taxis are now central to daily commutes. MOVE IT reported a 20% year-over-year jump in monthly active users during the first half of the year. Still, riders consistently voice the same worries: sudden rain, punishing heat, and shared helmet hygiene.

“Filipino commuters have become extraordinarily good at adapting to city life. What they should not have to accept is arriving at a meeting soaked, or starting the afternoon already behind,” says MOVE IT General Manager Wayne Jacinto.

Jacinto calls Ride-Ready a practical fix to help passengers end their ride looking as fresh as when they left home.

Price, availability

MOVE IT didn’t just launch online. From June to July, interactive booths popped up in major business hubs: Makati, BGC, Ortigas, and Cebu City. Commuters could claim items and book rides on-site.

With traffic and bad weather showing no signs of stopping, Ride-Ready offers a simple buffer so riders show up fresh instead of frazzled.

The lineup launched on GrabMart on July 13. Prices start at PhP 275, with mix-and-match savings bundles available. Check MOVE IT’s official social media channels for more details.

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