The app has been designed for use in England and Wales

The NHS Covid-19 app has been submitted to Huawei’s app store. The move will initially mean that users of Huawei’s older handsets will be able to download it from the firm’s App Gallery as an alternative to the Google Play store.

But it potentially paves the way for the contact-tracing software to come to the Chinese firm’s newer handsets too.

Huawei indicated that this might happen as soon as November. But others have stressed there are hurdles to overcome.

The app – which is designed for use in England and Wales – has already been downloaded more than 18 million times from Apple and Google’s own stores.

All of Huawei’s existing phones are powered by Android.

But models released since mid-2019 – including its P40, Mate 30 and Honor 30 series – lack access to the Google Play app store as well as a related library of tools known as Google Play Services, among other software from the US tech giant.

This is because of a trade ban imposed by the Trump administration that prevents Google and other American tech firms from working with Huawei.

In the case of most apps this is not a problem.

But Google Play Services provides access to the application programming interface (API) on which NHS Covid-19 and other similar contact-tracing apps rely.

The framework is designed to protect users’ privacy while giving the app access to some of iOS and Android’s underlying functionality, which they could not otherwise access.

To get round this problem, a spokesman for Huawei said that it had written its own API.

This includes its own process to trigger Bluetooth-based exposure notifications, which flag when two people have been standing too close to each other for too long.