Turkcell first operator outside China to sign up to Huawei’s HMS

Turkey’s Turkcell has signed a deal with Huawei Technologies to use the Chinese giant’s Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) mobile app/cloud infrastructure, becoming the first provider outside China to use the system, Reuters reported. Turkcell CEO Murat Erkan told a news conference that the cellco aims to sell a million HMS-enabled Huawei smartphones between April and end-2021, whilst continuing to support mobile software from Google and Apple. Seth Wang, Huawei Turkey Consumer Electronics manager, added that hundreds of software engineers were working to get the HMS infrastructure ready for use in Turkey.

Huawei developed HMS, including an app store and cloud services, after US government sanctions effectively prevented its new devices from using Google software including the Android operating system, Play Store and apps such as Gmail, YouTube and Maps.