Earlier this year we talked about Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT, which is most likely the only serious competitor to Android and iOS in the world. HarmonyOS started out as a mere Android skin, but over time Huawei invested heavily into the platform to expand it into a full-blown, custom operating system with a custom programming language, and it seems the company is finally ready to take the plunge and release HarmonyOS NEXT into the wild.
It’s indicated that HarmonyOS made up 17% of China’s smartphone market in Q1 of 2024. That’s a significant amount of potential devices breaking off from Android in a market dominated by either it or iOS.
HarmonyOS NEXT is set to begin rolling out to Huawei devices next week. The OS will first come to the Mate 60, Mate X5, and MatePad Pro on October 15.
↫ Andrew Romero at 9To5Google
Huawei has been hard at work making sure there’s no ‘application gap’ for people using HarmonyOS NEXT, claiming it has 10000 applications ready to go that cover “99.9%” of their users’ use case. That’s quite impressive, but of course, we’ll have to wait and see if the numbers line up with the reality on the ground for Chinese consumers. Here in the est HarmonyOS NEXT is unlikely to gain any serious traction, but that doesn’t mean I would mind taking a look at the platform if at all possible.
It’s honestly not surprising the most serious attempt at creating a third mobile ecosystem is coming from China, because here in the west the market is so grossly rusted shut we’re going to be stuck with Android and iOS until the day I die.
Are there any technical details on the origins of the OS? Is it forked from some existing kernel? Did they fork other existing tools like GNU toolchain?
Sounds like it is basically homegrown. Almost certainly a bunch of Open Source involved. I would not be surprised if it is GNU free though. There is not even any GNU in Android and I think Google builds it with Clang.
https://www.gizmochina.com/2024/01/19/huawei-reveals-harmonyos-next-will-be-based-on-harmony-kernel/
The first version of HarmonyOS was based on Android. The current version is basically a rewrite.
In North America, the Chinese handset makers have completely disappeared. I am not sure of the situation in Europe. However, in the rest of the world I think they are all still there. When I visited Colombia, both Huawei and Xiaomi were very much still popular.
Inside China, I can see other handset makers adopting HarmonyOS. Why would they want competing app ecosystems ( unless they control the store )? Why would they want to risk the rug being pulled out from them by the West?
Non-Chinese apps will find their way onto these handsets if they continue to be sold around the world. If the app ecosystem becomes viable, there is no reason for a Western facing hand-set maker not to adopt it as well. Google is increasingly manipulating Android to their own advantage. If I was a handset maker, I could see wanting to get out from under that. I could see a western “fork” of HarmonyOS that basically just creates a clone that has been audited as “safe” for western users.
I am not saying this will happen. Apps rule the world and I would not want to be a handset maker going it alone on an alternative OS in a western market. That said, I would not bet against it either. If HarmonyOS gains traction in China, it would not surprise me to see it leak out to the rest of us.
Here, in Poland, more than half in shop displays is Oppo, Xiaomi, Honor, TCL, .. and on,.. and on. Not counting , usually separate, Apple. The rest is Samsung, and Motorola which is ,well, Lenovo actually…
tanishaj,
That’s a good point. As US consumers we don’t experience quite the same markets. The chinese brands were effectively wiped out here. It wasn’t really through competitive means, but rather outright government bans.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-equipment-sales-imports-zte-huawei-over-national-security-risk-2022-11-25/
BestBuy still selling OnePlus. Looks like Huawei is the only one that got banned for stuff they did (and now can’t use the Google stuff). Some light searching says the others find the US market too difficult and don’t want to go through carrier certification. Plus it’s not like these brands have ever faired well in the US anyway.
Huawei actually fared quite well being an android OEM before government intervention. (Incidentally this is probably part of their problems).
“Huawei’s smartphone market share, by sales to end users from first quarter 2016 to the fourth quarter 2020”
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1168524/global-huawei-market-share-end-user-sales/
Statistica sometimes uses a bait and switch paywall, so I’ll try and describe the graph in case it disappears: it starts at 8.3% 2016Q1 to 18.4% 2020Q2 and then dropping back down to 8.9% 2020Q4 amid the sanctions and bans.
https://www.androidcentral.com/trump-administration-will-soon-begin-blocking-huaweis-global-chip-supply
https://www.androidcentral.com/huaweis-sales-continued-rise-2020-despite-us-sanctions
>”because here in the west the market is so grossly rusted shut we’re going to be stuck with Android and iOS until the day I die”
I’m old enough to remember when Blackberry ruled the world and was “invincible”. A whole 14 years ago. Things don’t always change in the phone world, but when they do, they change very fast. I pray that you live a lot longer than 14 more years, Thom.
andyprough,
I recall there being more competition. In addition to blackberry there was motorola, nokia, LG, sony ericsson in addition to androids and iphones and smaller brands too. I don’t think many people would have felt that blackberry was “invincible” in 2010, if ever. I take your point that things can change, but the level of market consolidation today is much worse now than in the period you are referring to. It genuinely might not be possible for new platforms to break into the market today because so many consumers are increasingly dependent on the android & iphone duopoly.
Also governments have adopted Android and iOS for there apps, like digital acces to your citizen things (no idea how it is called in English). Other OSes dont work.
Agreed, I was a committed phone-hopper back then, and from what I recall Blackberry was only “big” in the corporate world until their lunch started being eaten in that segment by Android and iPhone, so they decided to branch out into the mainstream consumer market with the Pearl and Curve lines. Those devices were still Blackberry with all the business oriented features, but with a consumer-friendly design and marketing to match. Up until then though, if you saw someone with a Blackberry it was a corporate drone, a government official, or a drug dealer.
When that move didn’t work out for them, they started making touch-screen devices to compete more directly with Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone 7/8 devices, and created the QNX-derived BB10 to replace their antiquated OS to run them. It was too little too late and now there is no such thing as a true business-oriented phone or mobile OS, which is a shame.
Back when my boss upgraded to Blackberry I inherited his “old” star tac flip/Palm hybrid. I think he regretted it down inside.
In those days people just used the features supplied with the phone and rarely installed any third party applications. Switching from one mobile device to another was relatively easy as they all had the same basic functionality and very little lock-in.
These days people might have invested in lots of third party apps or devices, which are then died to the one platform making it much more difficult to move.
At least the mobile market settled on 2 choices, corporate desktops have been pretty much locked in to a single monoculture for more than 20 years now.
I’m old enough to remember that was 100% bullshit. No one seriously thought that. It was a small bubble of self important business users. They felt special because they could suddenly write emails anywhere on a phone so their companies were handing them out. It was a token of their importance to the company. And a lot of the marketing and support was written to hype up how special they were.
Blackberry didn’t have much of an app ecosystem, all they had was a messaging platform (basically a glorified WhatsApp). And since it was for business use and not a status symbol like iMessage, businesses had no problem moving their employees to Slack or Exchange or whatever.
Generally, before iOS, very few people installed apps on their phones (except J2Me games). Most people I knew with Nokia Nseries phones didn’t know their phones could take apps like chat clients, alternative mp3 players, alternative file managers, alternative camera apps, or even native games with better graphics and performance than J2ME.
Android and iOS have extensive app ecosystems, and (here is the difficult part), the purchased apps are locked into App Store accounts, you can’t take your CD-ROMs to another OS like you could do with Desktop Linux + Wine.
What’s actually important to most people is not the number of apps but the “killer” apps: WhatsApp (Weibo in China), TikTok, Netflix, your bank … Most likely they have this covered in China but not yet in the western world.
This is just a fever dream, yes the Chinese companies are still selling all over outside the west but almost all of those companies are selling Android handsets.
Huawei Will do very good in China where they can get the Chinese government etc to make sure local app makers make apps for their handset but outside of China unless they are running some Android subsystem that can run Android apps, no one is buying a device that doesn’t have WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. And none of those companies are going to make their apps for a handset that has no marketshare in the west (with a ban looming TikTok won’t even do it because they will look too close to a company that is close to the Chinese government and makes most of the cameras and networking gear the Chinese government uses to monitor their own citizens)
So it sounds good but it’s just a dream.
This is only true with ones first phone in given ecosystem. The moment you realize you can’t get the same app/game as your friends, insurance company, bank, you start planning on upgrading your phone to other OS.
I’m curious if harmonyos supports FDroid or some sort of equivalent. Anyone know?
Apparently not.
” 10000 applications ready to go that cover “99.9%” of their users’ use case. ”
Do I want to know how they know their users use case?
Exactly the same way Google (and Samsung and other phone manufacturers) know their users’ use case?