Deezer teamed up with Huawei back in June to bring the music streaming app to Huawei’s own App Gallery app store – the app has ‘hero status’ so is one of the top apps on the store.

So we joined a conversation with Huawei’s global senior marketing manager Peter Gauden and Deezer’s chief commercial officer Laurence Miall-d’Août to discuss the partnership and what it means for both.

“I guess there's a shared challenge mentality there where we're building [momentum],” says Miall-d'Août. ”I think both companies are building their experiences and trying to maximise them as much as possible. So yeah, there are definitely lots of shared values.

“I do think Huawei is an amazing company, first of all. I think the design is great. People talk a lot about the quality of the [camera] image, but I think the quality of the sound is also exceptional. So, really, choosing to be distributed…with Huawei was key, especially for mature markets, and to some extent, emerging markets as well.

“From our side I guess the biggest thing is an application with huge global popularity” adds Gauden, speaking about Deezer’s 16 million-strong userbase. “You've got a wealth of really high-quality content for those people who understand music.”

Miall-d'Août believes that Deezer’s strength is in its localisation. “We think we're the only [streaming service[ who really entertains customers through a local and inclusive music experience; we are music experts.

Would users see through Deezer’s approach if they didn’t have those editors? “I think so and the way we measure that is the people actually who follow the editors in the countries.”

“In France, we have six local editors and the same in Brazil. With all of these music genres, you need to have experts in them and they're very well trusted. So it's paramount our editors [find] the local gems, and we get the right mix of local sourcing and identifying new artists. It's harder obviously in the UK because it's global almost.”

Gauden says this fits well with App Gallery’s global-local approach, which he calls ‘glocal’. ‘You’ve got huge global applications, but also providing to users the ability to tap into the local services in front of them through AppGallery. And actually, there's a perfect match there with these as well obviously [Deezer is] full of amazing music from the big music houses, but also a lot of independent local studios as well as local indie labels. And that really matches that Glocal approach.”

“And I guess when you got a platform with over 420 million-plus monthly active users [AppGallery’s userbase], there are a lot of people who are looking for a lot of choices. They're looking for high-quality services through high-quality applications.

“Every app that joins us is that little one step forward. We really have only been working in a dedicated manner on AppGallery for a year. And already, we've grown so significantly. And it all goes [towards] AppGallery being a much more complete destination for power users - for their application needs they can find pretty much everything now and, as we said, this local approach is really important to us.

“Yes we provide access to all of the bigger applications but we also make sure that we cover a lot of the really local applications that are important to consumers with a lot of work. for example. on transport and travel. So we've got Lufthansa and Ryanair. We've done a lot of work in banking and finance so we've got big banks like BBVA.

“So there are a lot of new large and local applications that are joining us. And it really just makes it a much more comprehensive [offering]. The more people engage with us, the more that they find that there is actually the applications that they really need.”

Both companies also see audio quality as an area where they work together well.

“We are also known for audio quality,” says Miall-d’Août, “both on the Premium [tier] but also on our HiFi product, which delivers lossless FLAC quality -  so we like to be perceived as [being] very high quality and I guess similar to Huawei’s high-quality spec. That's where I think the innovation of both companies come together.

“We really want to bring that as what I mean by being an inclusive music experience we want to bring everybody on board with really high quality, and I'm delighted that the Huawei phones have such high-quality audio as well because it's would be a shame if the sound quality is lost [because of] the device quality.