It’s definitely clear that Huawei is pulling the plug on Android apps, but it’s still rather hard to believe that the company is throwing away Android (AOSP) entirely. For that, we’ll just have to wait and see, as more digging can be done when “Next” hits the scene next year.
The Chinese market is big enough to sustain its own application ecosystem, and many western services are banned in China anyway, so the Play Store is of lesser value there. It makes sense for Huawei to not waste time and resources on maintaining Android application compatibility.
I would guess they would be doing this for their own domestic market and not for the international market (except for Russia). They would probably roll out their own replacements for the APIs. But I would still think that they’ll be using stuff like ART/Dalvik and some kind of bastardized APK format for these markets. Note that Goog themselves have moved away from APK to AAB.
adkilla,
I would expect that would be the case. China has their own popular applications for internal consumption (like WeChat), however most of their western customers would prefer familiar ones like WhatsApp or Signal.
They would either have everyone, including Google for YouTube, GMail, etc, to write applications for their new platform,
Add a pretty good “web application” support, probably like never seen before,
Or add Android emulation…
In order to be relevant in the global mobile markets.
Isn’t this just a folk of Android? Afterall, there is no way they could write a whole OS so fast with it being so mature if it was from scratch in the amount of time since they started the project.
There are open sobre alternatives for all the components needed in a mobile operating system.
I doubt they wrote a whole OS from scratch, but that doesn’t mean it has to be Android based. PostmarketOS (based on Alpine Linux) could be forked, as well as UBports (formerly Ubuntu Touch). Amazon is already moving away from Android to some sort of Linux based OS for their TV and speaker devices, and their tablets will likely follow.
With all of the user-hostile, OEM-hostile, and developer-hostile changes Google is making to Android, it’s no wonder some of the major players are breaking free and moving on to a more sensible OS base.
Its certainly possible to do something other than Android, and y0u hear rumors of Amazon doing that as well. However, leaving Android leaves behind a lot of optimizations that have been well thought out and proven in the field to increase battery life. Not to mention most chips only really come with drivers for and assume Android as an os. its a very difficult task, good thing they have a lot of money, and I think Huawei is working on their own chips as well, which would go a long way to help.