[Official statement] [BREAKING] As Realme OS nears, Realme starts collaborating with HeyTap and revokes the community app

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on September 11, 2019) follows:

Realme’s grand plan to conquer the lucrative Indian smartphone market is quite similar to that of Xiaomi. Besides flooding the market with tons of bang-for-the buck smartphones, they are gradually building a full-fledged software based ecosystem.

Like many Asian OEMs, a substitute app market is a good alternative to the Google Play Store. The companies can push in-house apps (often considered as bloatware, duh!) and themes, which are generally not suitable to distribute via Google’s platform.

Realme is also pushing their customers to create a unified account for accessing these services, which can also be used in the Realme Community app. They are following the footsteps of OnePlus and Xiaomi: combining bug report tracking, community building and value added services under the same umbrella.

A sudden twist in the event as the Community app is now taken down from Play Store! Moreover, the whole account handling job is now being transferred to a new entity called ‘HeyTap’.

Being an offspring of OPPO, Realme is still using the ColorOS skin from its parent company. In fact, the personal data of the Realme accounts are managed by OPPO as per the license agreement. Well, seems that something big is coming soon.

Two days ago, we highlighted the potential plan of the company about pushing product news and ads via a subtle change in the Realme account settings. Collaborating with a company whose primary business strategy is to monetize the harvested user data with apps and other services is certainly another step towards that direction.

Realme is currently pushing these notifications to existing users via System UI; probably the same path they are going to exploit in the near future for advertising.

The migration should be completed by September 15. The whole account and other internet services will be named after HeyTap from that day.

Starting from Sep 15, realme account and realme Internet services will be known as HeyTap account and HeyTap Internet services, respectively.

The HeyTap brand is copyrighted by Singapore based BRAVO UNICORN PTE.LTD, which was established on May 15 this year. Now that Realme is preparing the fully overhauled Android distro (popularly referred to as Realme OS), guess they don’t want to store the data of their customers inside Chinese servers.

We are still exploring the connections between Realme and HeyTap so stay tuned for further updates on the matter. If you spot anything interesting from either of them on your phone, do let us know by commenting below.

Realme has published an official statement regarding their collaboration with HeyTap.

Q: Why has realme chosen to work with HeyTap?

A: In order to meet users’ needs for comprehensive Internet services in the era of intelligent connectivity, realme and HeyTap have a cooperation whereby HeyTap provides Internet services to realme users.

You can find further details in this thread. They have also brought back the Realme Community app in Google Play Store.

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