Huawei has been in a tight spot in the past couple of years, and their situation keeps getting tighter. But the Chinese giant has no intention of going anywhere, at least not without putting up a good fight. Last year, at HDC 2019, Huawei had announced its own first-party operating system, Harmony OS, showing off an important piece of its vision for the future. Harmony OS was shown off first on the Honor Vision Smart TV, and Huawei remained committed to Android at the time for its smartphone needs. The company reiterated those plans again in December 2019. But recent developments have forced the company to rethink its strategy. At HDC 2020, Huawei has now announced that Harmony OS will come to smartphones after all, with an expected beta SDK by the end of 2020, and a phone release around October 2021.
We will probably not see much of this operating system here in the west, but I’m still intrigued. It’s entirely custom – not based on Linux – and they’ve been working on it for quite a while now. I have no interest in it from a general use perspective since I doubt it will be very useful here in the west, but am incredibly curious to see what they’re cooking up.
I’m interested to know what will happen when their OS will gain traction and the US wants accessing this ecosystem, that’s to say their (30%) share of the pie 🙂
The “West” is much more than just the USA.
Huawei is doing just fine in plenty of countries within the EU, for example.
This will be the final rude awakening for the USA, who assumed their lead in software would be eternal though.
The Android licensing mess affects the whole row of, not just the USA. Huawei has been stagnating everywhere after they lost access to Google services. Additionally their 5G hardware, an industry leader, has been facing objections due to close tie with the Chinese regime.
It’s a temporary setback.
The US is now dropping all pretense of “free” market and it’s showing it’s teeth because they know China is about bootstrap the single largest middle class market in history. And by having closed their market to American services, they already have their “own” equivalents so although the google licensing has hurt Huawei in the world market, their internal position remains strong. So they will weather this just fine.
Within 5 years China will have enough internal demand to surpass USA as the single most important market. The US knows this, and they’re literally throwing everything they can against China. The US market is already tapped out in terms of growth, and China will still have another 700 million people left to join the middle class. That’s a momentum of growth that the US can’t match.
We’re witnessing one empire stagnating, and another rising.
India might be next supposedly for largest market
I would not touch a OS made by a company that has ties with (actually, controlled by) CCP even with a barge pole.
You have to love the name ‘HarmonyOS’. Such a Chinese name to come up with like ‘FriendShipOS’ or ‘TogetherOS’…
The real names should be ‘RootKitOS’ or ‘MassSurvelanceOS’ or ‘DisgressionaryIncarcerationOS’.
Fk C#ina !
Anonew,
Point taken, but frankly you shouldn’t trust the NSA, GCHQ, unit 8200, etc either, we know they have backdoors too, information for several of them were leaked in the snowden documents. Theretically we have a constitution to protect us, but our governments do away with the constitution when it suits them and even post snowden they’re still violating privacy rights. Just this month it came out that the FBI was routinely violating laws by simply taking what they want and not even bothering with judicial warrants.
Both china and the US say normal people don’t have anything to worry about unless they pose a risk to national security, but this is of little comfort when both have been guilty of using trumped up national security excuses to do whatever they want.
So while you have my support in criticizing china, I’m not sure boycotting chinese products materially solves the issue – unless perhaps you are ok with the hypocrisy of our own governments having wiretaps and using backdoors.
From a practical matter, I think the issue is which of the large governments that are watching you are you most likely to offend and face consequences from. Prior to 2016 I think there were many more people that would have said China, now… I’m not sure. Whom you might offend in the US may change, while the data they have will likely persist.