Huawei Technologies Co (華為) on Friday took the wraps off its HarmonyOS, offering the first glimpses of its in-house operating system that might someday replace Google’s Android at the Chinese firm and reduce its reliance on US technology.
To begin with, the open-source software is to skip smartphones and instead find its way into everything from vehicles and watches to personal computers by next year, Huawei consumer products division head Richard Yu (余承東) said at a launch event.
Earbuds and virtual reality goggles will follow. Huawei is considering running the OS on its upcoming flagship Mate 30, he told reporters.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Because we support Google’s Android ecosystem, we will prioritize Android for smartphones. If we can’t use Android, we can install HarmonyOS quickly,” Yu said at Huawei’s developers conference in Dongguan. “We had a great chance to become the world’s biggest vendor by shipment — if not for the [US-China] trade war.”
HarmonyOS, previously code-named “Hongmeng” or “Ark,” is an important part of Huawei’s effort to develop alternatives in response to sanctions on US technology it needs to make its gear.
Underscoring the unpredictability of supply, the White House is delaying a decision about licenses for US companies to resume selling to Huawei.
China’s largest technology company has found itself at the center of sensitive trade negotiations between Beijing and Washington, with the latter accusing its geopolitical rival of stealing technology and posing a risk to US national security. Irrespective of how the talks play out, US administrative curbs have all but smothered Huawei’s goal of overtaking Samsung Electronics Co to become the world’s largest maker of smartphones.
While Huawei’s operating system might serve it well in its domestic market, any plans to dethrone Google’s Android globally will be misplaced, said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Research.
“Huawei with deep pockets and scale in China can pull this off in the domestic market, but to reach Google Android level service integration and app quality outside China is going to be less trivial and a mammoth task,” he said.
Huawei seems confident it can do it.
“Our HarmonyOS is more powerful and secure than Android and it has greater distributed capability and is future-facing,” Yu said. “Can HarmonyOS be installed on smartphones? Of course.”
For HarmonyOS to work, Huawei will need developers to build apps for its ecosystem — a major question mark around its fledgling software.
“It took Android a decade to reach here with deep integration of Google Mobile Services, and it now has a well curated and relatively secure App Store with millions of apps, advanced AI capabilities,” Shah said.
Last year, Huawei spent at least 500 million yuan (US$70 million) to lure developers to work on its homegrown OS and the company might invest more this year, Yu said.
“The biggest attraction is our profit-sharing scheme. We may only keep 10 percent of the app profits and leave the rest to developers,” he said.
The efficacy of HarmonyOS is something Huawei still has to prove. Yu went into back-end technical details, but refrained from describing consumer-facing features, suggesting that it might not yet be ready for prime-time.
To help with app migration, HarmonyOS will be built on the Linux and Huawei’s own LiteOS kernels for now, Yu said, which will change in future generations of the OS.
Two months into a US ban that cut off Huawei from American suppliers, the company is starting to feel the pinch. It warned of a tougher performance in the second half of this year and has been internally preparing for a drop in overseas smartphone shipments of a staggering 60 million units.
Yu said on Friday that sanctions imposed in May had already reduced smartphone shipments by more than 10 million units in the second quarter.
Huawei is delaying the release of the Mate X, its first foldable smartphone, because of “production volume issues.”
Yu warned that buyers might have to wait until November for the long-awaited product.
The postponement is a major blow for the Chinese company, which is battling Samsung and Apple in the global smartphone market.
Huawei has looked to its home turf to offset international headwinds. The company has assigned as many as 10,000 engineers, working across three shifts a day, to develop alternatives to US software and components. Huawei already designs its own HiSilicon Kirin processors, although it retains a reliance on US firms such as Qualcomm Inc and Broadcom Inc for additional wireless chips.
It is focusing on domestic sales. The company commanded 37 percent of the Chinese smartphone market in the second quarter, according to IDC, giving it roughly the same share as the second and third-largest vendors combined.
Strong home-market sales boosted Huawei’s shipments by 24 percent to 118 million units in the first half, the company said earlier.
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