Huawei Wants To Take Homegrown HarmonyOS Phone Platform Worldwide (theregister.com) 7
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. "We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world," Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week. Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.
"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps -- and thousands of other apps -- up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS.
It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.
"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps -- and thousands of other apps -- up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS.
It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.
Product bundle (Score:1)
Maybe they can bundle it with China's shitty vehicles.
Bonus: give the EU something else to bitch about.
Harmony will create disharmony (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know. Yet.
Would Huawei nag me to give them my CC number?
If not, then it's already a step in right direction*.
*However short lived: Silicon Valley/Wall Street (with StateDep support) won't allow something like this to exist. Obviously.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not 'Homegrown' (Score:2)
People always call it 'Homegrown', I guess because that's what Huawei's press releases say and they're just parroting it back?
But Mainland China doesn't do anything from scratch. It's (extensively) modded Linux/Android - at least for the phones, which is why you can load APKs. On smaller devices it's based on LiteOS and there are other variations. Its like Proud Russian OS and Proud North Korean OS and (a couple other) Proud Chinese OS which are... yes, OpenBSD and Linux with a repaint.
The Google monopoly (Score:2)
The problem with Android OS is, 90% of apps are driven by advertizing: Correction, the problem is, Google deliberately hides the ad-free software. Porting Android apps to a clone OS won't fix that. Another problem is the phone/tablet ecosystem: Lack of device drivers or updates for old hardware, and monolithic OS updates . Again, porting won't fix that.
Then, there are problems outside the Google monopoly. The first problem is, will it be available in English? Since China is already full of English/