Packed into a small room, a drone, bipedal robot, supermarket checkout and other devices showcase a vision of China’s software future — one where an operating system developed by national champion Huawei (華為) has replaced Windows and Android.
The collection is at the Harmony Ecosystem Innovation Center in the southern city of Shenzhen, a local government-owned entity that encourages authorities, companies and hardware makers to develop software using OpenHarmony (鴻蒙), an open-source version of the operating system Huawei launched five years ago after US sanctions cut off support for Google’s Android.
While Huawei’s recent strong-selling smartphone launches have been closely watched for signs of advances in China’s chip supply chain, the company has also quietly built up expertise in sectors crucial to Beijing’s vision of technology self-sufficiency, from operating systems to in-vehicle software.
Photo: AFP
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last year told the Chinese Communist Party’s elite politburo that China must wage a difficult battle to localize operating systems and other technology “as soon as possible,” as the US cracks down on exports of advanced chips and other components.
OpenHarmony is being widely promoted within China as a “national operating system,” amid concerns that other major companies could be severed from the Microsoft Windows and Android products upon which many systems rely.
“This strategic move will likely erode the market share of Western operating systems like Android and Windows in China, as local products gain traction,” Jamestown Foundation associate fellow Sunny Cheung said.
In the first quarter of this year, Huawei’s HarmonyOS, the company’s in-house version of the operating system, surpassed Apple’s iOS to become the second best-selling mobile operating system in China behind Android, research firm Counterpoint said. It has not been launched on smartphones outside China.
Huawei no longer controls OpenHarmony, having gifted its source code to a nonprofit called the OpenAtom Foundation (開放原子開源基金會) in 2020 and 2021, an internal memo and other releases said.
The growth of HarmonyOS, expected to be rolled out in a PC version this year or next, would spur adoption of OpenHarmony, analysts said.
“Harmony has created a powerful foundational operating system for the future of China’s devices,” Huawei consumer business group chairman Richard Yu (余承東) said last week.
Huawei first unveiled Harmony in August 2019, three months after Washington placed it under trade restrictions over alleged security concerns. Huawei denies its equipment poses a risk.
Since then, China has stepped up its self-sufficiency efforts, cutting itself off from the main code sharing hub Github and championing a local version, Gitee.
China banned the use of Windows on government computers in 2014 and they now use mostly Linux-based operating systems.
Originally built on an open source Android system, this year Huawei launched its first “pure” version of HarmonyOS that no longer supports Android-based apps, in a move that further bifurcates China’s app ecosystem from the rest of the world.
OpenAtom appeared to be coordinating with Chinese firms to develop a viable alternative to US technologies, including for defense applications such as satellites, a report from Jamestown Foundation last month said.
OpenHarmony last year was the fastest-growing open-source operating system for smart devices, with more than 70 organizations contributing to it, and more than 460 hardware and software products built across finance, education, aerospace and industry, Huawei said in its annual report last year.
Key OpenHarmony developers include Shenzhen Kaihong Digital (深圳開鴻數字), headed by Wang Chenglu (王成錄), a former Huawei employee known as Harmony’s “godfather,” and Chinasoft.
Both have worked on infrastructure software, at Tianjin Port and for mines in China’s top coal-producing province, Shaanxi.
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