It’s fair to say that I’ve been rather critical of the Huawei and Honor phones of late. The PR teams aren’t happy with me, but sometimes I need to tell it like it is.
If you’ve bought yourself an Honor 9X or an Honor 9A (or a Huawei P40 Pro etc) then I applaud you. These phones are all brilliant. They have the build-quality, the performance and the design that you’ve grown to expect from the Huawei teams.
However, there’s no Google Play. Instead you get an “AppGallery” and this is the default app store on the phone. Sadly though, it lacks a lot of the big-name apps.
Luckily there’s an app called “Petal Search” which hunts around the internet and beyond to find the app you want. A lot of the time it’ll find what you want, and – ignoring the lack of a Google Maps / YouTube / Gmail app – you’ll end up being pretty happy with your phone.
I’ve been critical because I’d like to see “Petal Search” integrated into “AppGallery”. There’s an element of mixed messaging – a default app store which lacks big-name apps but a “Petal Search” app which actually does have those apps. Why doesn’t the default store have this app-finding functionality?
I’m therefore going to be a bit more positive in my tone today because I think I’ve given Huawei and Honor more grief than the American government 🙂
If you’ve got yourself a Huawei P40 Pro, an Honor 9A or an Honor 9X and you’re feeling a bit lost, do this..
1 – Go to “AppGallery” on your phone and find “Petal Search”..
2 – Download and install the app. It arguably does a far better job of finding the apps you want.
3 – Going forward, use “Petal Search” instead of “AppGallery” to get your apps. To make things even smoother, put ticks into the warning message so that you don’t have it pop up each time.
Put “Don’t ask me again” and this message will go away.
Hopefully this will help many new owners!