Huawei puts out a range of good smartwatches and fitness trackers including the Band 3 Pro and Watch GT 2, and that's not even including those made by its sub-brand Honor. However, there was a recent change to how you connect its wearables to your smartphone, make the prospect of owning one of these devices rather less appealing.
Now, you need to download as many as three apps if you own an Android phone, and not all of them are available on the Play Store. That's reason enough to make devices from other companies look more tempting, but if you've already got a Huawei smartwatch or fitness tracker, you're forced to go through this process.
To make the somewhat confusing ordeal a little bit easier, we've written this guide on how to connect your Huawei smartwatch or fitness tracker to your phone.
How to connect your Huawei smartwatch or fitness tracker to a smartphone
Firstly, make sure you've got your wearable and phone to hand. On the phone, head into the Play Store and download Huawei Health app. For any other wearable, one connectivity app would be enough, but this is just the start of your ordeal.
To use Huawei Health, you also need to download Huawei Mobile Services, so find this app in the Play Store and download it too. However this version of HMS doesn't work properly, and the only way to update it is to download a third app.
This third app, Huawei AppGallery, isn't actually available on the Play Store. The app, which Huawei created to replace the Play Store on its phones (given the Huawei ban means the company can't use the Play Store), is exactly what its name suggests – an app to download other apps with.
To download the AppGallery, you have to head over to Huawei's website. Click 'Install Now', give your web browser permission to download files if you haven't already, and download the file. Now go into your phone's downloads file and select the app, which prompts AppGallery to install.
When you're in the AppGallery app, agree to its permissions, then search 'HMS Core' and update it. This should take a short while, but when it's done, the Huawei Mobile Services you downloaded before should be updated, which means you can head into Huawei Health without any issue.
Once you're in Huawei Health, you'll be prompted to sign in with your Huawei ID (which you'll need to create if you don't already have), although you can sign in via SMS to save time.
Now, finally, you'll be in Huawei Health, and you can set up your wearable by heading to 'Devices' in the bottom menu and pressing 'Add', then following the instructions on screen.
With this done, you'll have finally set up your Huawei smartwatch or fitness tracker and connected it to your phone. It seems to be a huge amount of work compared to similar processes for Apple Watch, Wear OS or Fitbit devices, but hopefully Huawei will simplify the process soon.
