Four Chinese smartphone brands including Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo are poised to jointly build a new platform which serves to facilitate developers when uploading apps to apps stores of these four phone brands, the Central News Agency reported on February 6. This decision can be seen as an aggressive move to catch up with the Google Play Store. The new platform, named GDSA (Global Developer Service Alliance), also allows foreign developers to upload apps onto their app stores and market their apps in foreign markets easier than before. The website for signing up an account has been launched, covering mainly 9 markets: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The reason behind this decision may be mainly due to the US trade ban against Huawei that has prohibited the company’s access to the Google Play Store and other Google services on its new devices. This has forced these Chinese brands to join forces.