Huawei is spending a lot of money and encouraging ecosystem partnerships to bolster its operating system (OS) HarmonyOS.
This is according to Paul Scanlan, CTO of Huawei's Carrier Business Group, speaking to ITWeb on the sidelines of this year’s Mobile World Congress.
Scanlan believes the industry is more than ready for a third OS player, revealing there are some customers who think Google is too big and want to try so something different.
“You want to try something different? Okay, then try it,” he encourages. “Maybe some will be disappointed but maybe some will be happy – there may be that group of customers who’ve never experienced them [Android and iOS] and say it doesn’t matter.
“If there are 684 million devices that are non-Google, it’s a significant amount of the population.”
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei started focusing on building its own operating system following sanctions imposed by the US government.
In May 2019, then US president Donald Trump announced Huawei – along with several other Chinese companies – had been placed on the blacklisted entities list. Companies on this list are unable to do business with any organisation that operates in the US.
With the ban, Huawei cannot work with companies such as Google, Qualcomm and Intel, among others. This means new Huawei smartphones are no longer able to ship with Google-owned applications pre-installed.
Following the blacklisting, Huawei unveiled HarmonyOS in August 2019, dubbing it a new microkernel-based, distributed OS designed to deliver a cohesive user experience across all devices and scenarios.
At the time, the company said a beta version of its operating system would be used on devices targeting the Chinese market, saying the OS will first be used on devices like smartwatches, smart screens, in-vehicle systems and smart speakers.
Last June, Huawei revealed its first line of products that would be powered by HarmonyOS: the Watch 3 and MatePad Pro tablet, with the company saying it plans to expand availability across its hardware ecosystem.
According to Scanlan, Huawei began the development of HarmonyOS before its “problems”, referring to the challenges that saw the company caught up in the geo-political storm between China and the US.
Huawei made an original commitment of $1.5 billion to develop HarmonyOS over a period of time, he states, adding it is probably two or three years into development of that programme.
“The objective is to encourage third-party applications to come on to the HarmonyOS,” he comments.
“We had been experimenting with different operating systems on mobile phones. Some companies wanted us to put Microsoft on it, other companies wanted us to put Firefox because of the different markets.
“They already understood that Google was having dominance, and this was many years ago – 10 years or so. The companies were looking at a company like Huawei that would do things special for operators, which is something that we considered.”
However, there wasn’t much success with those experiments, until HarmonyOS, which the global CTO describes as “very different”.
“First of all, in China, there’s a very large base of very loyal Chinese. When you have this geo-political thing, people feel that at a nationalistic level. That suggests you’ve got a pretty large captive market that might be encouraged to use an alternative, notwithstanding it might have some gaps.
“Google has not been around in China for a long time, so those Chinese users are not used to using Google in any case – they use a lot of the Chinese applications. So, for a Chinese company to encourage Chinese applications on a Chinese platform is fairly straightforward.
“Outside China, we do need to make this encouragement to demonstrate our value. There are about 100 million Chinese outside China and that’s a good start. We also need to encourage people who are non-Chinese.
“We’ve put on all the common applications. We still have some challenges with some US-dominated ones – which are reluctant because of the US issue – but we continue.”
According to Scanlan, the second difference that sets HarmonyOS apart is that “it’s not like a Google or Apple ecosystem”.
For example, the concept of Harmony is to connect everything, he elaborates, adding it aims to create connections across platforms and devices.
“You don’t get those things on a Google. You might get some of it on a Nest application or some of it on a Bixby component, but they’re all bespoke. This is [Harmony] across everything.
“We’re restricted in the capability of smartphones with GMS and with the chips, so we package up what we can. We package up Snapdragon 888 and we put them into a foldable phone – it’s 4G but there’s a lot of mileage out of 4G.
“The cameras, hardware platform and everything are still leading. Even though we have a couple of gaps, if you can live without a Google Maps you can use Petal Search or Petal Maps.”
In terms of functionality and where HarmonyOS is headed, Scanlan points to autonomous vehicles – everything will be integrated, including the heads-up display and battery power management.
“You’ll walk into the car and everything will be ready; you won’t need to do anything else as long as the Bluetooth is on.”
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