Abstract:

Urban accessibility remains an underdeveloped aspect of urban planning, with public spaces often inaccessible to people with disabilities. Since 2019, new Huawei smartphones have shipped without Google Mobile Services (GMS), complicating application development for a substantial share of the Android market. This paper reports on AidMap, a civic-technology mobile application for reporting accessibility barriers, built with Flutter and Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and intentionally independent of GMS. We document the architectural decisions and integration trade-offs encountered during development and identify a structural gap in the HMS ecosystem: no augmented reality (AR) solution is currently available that is both GMS-independent and not constrained to Kirin-based hardware. The findings are intended to inform developers evaluating HMS-only or hybrid GMS/HMS strategies.