opinion Launching a new mobile OS is what professional technology historians would call an act of foolishness. It’s so ridiculous that even Microsoft stopped caring after doing it three or four times – did we all just imagine Kin?
Apple and Android have all the apps, all the hardware, and all the markets, and the sponge of innovation has dried up between them. What paranoid costumes of the planet Wibble will surround the scene?
Huawei. Until 2019, it was a Google partner running full Android. It then forked its own version of Android called HarmonyOS, stopped including Google’s own apps, and founded its own Android app store.
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As of last week, the platform has banished all Android code, bypassed all Android apps, and is now entirely homegrown and relying solely on native apps. Huawei says the number is 15,000, but that’s just ignoring the more than 1 million apps in both areas of the big two.
Such rudeness must come from something special inside, right? The benefits that Huawei touts regarding HarmonyOS NEXT are obvious if you haven’t owned or used a smartphone in the past 20 years. Only attractive. Things like having an app sense the direction of gravity via your phone’s accelerometer seem as much fun now as they did when the original iPhone was launched. Remember those beer apps that let you virtually drink a pint by tilting your device to your lips? That was 10 seconds of fun.
Others have the familiar feel of ideas that have long come and gone on waves of apathy and irrelevance. HarmonyOS is a distributed system with real-time routes and supports multiple devices working as one. For example, you can control your game screen from your mobile device or peek into the temperature of your HarmonyOS smart oven while moving your game screen from your phone to your HarmonyOS TV. Something like this would be great for demoing on stage or in a future home where everything, including the fridge, is running on the same platform. Is that your life? Do you want to be like that?
If Huawei were someone other than Huawei and based somewhere other than China, the rest of the story would be easy to write. A year or so of brave promises, a few hardware launches, the numbers spiraling into a miasma of apathy from both sellers and developers, and another footnote in the history of California’s two tribes. It will be.
That won’t happen. Last year, Huawei launched its flagship phone, the Mate 60 Pro, which also defied market logic. It was at least two generations behind mainstream phones outside of China, had no international presence, and was rarely sold domestically. However, there were two things worth noting. It sold in the tens of millions, and it shouldn’t have existed.
Four years earlier, the United States had led a coalition of high-tech companies in implementing an embargo aimed at blocking China in general, and Huawei in particular, from its ability to access cutting-edge chip foundries and manufacturing technology. Unlike the measure that triggered the end of Google’s commercial partnership with Huawei, there was no clear workaround for hardware sanctions.
Huawei has fallen from China’s market leader to a single-digit share as it depletes its stockpile of processors, which it cannot import or manufacture locally.
The Mate 60 showed how much that has turned around. SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, has leveraged its proprietary technology and extended its capabilities to the 7nm node. This wasn’t unprecedented, and it wasn’t cutting edge, but it had enough yield to support a commercial Phoenix. Almost every other part of the phone, except memory, is also locally designed and manufactured, including 5G and satellite radio.
That’s the key to HarmonyOS NEXT. It doesn’t compete with Android or Apple in features or ecosystem depth. still. It competes with Western attempts to displace China from parity in technology that gives it real power.
China has the resources and the will to propel itself through accelerated evolution into a place of independence strong enough to reach that parity. This will require a fully commercial environment, and this will undoubtedly include a mobile app platform that is not influenced by foreign interests. It will take some time to get there, but it’s more than enough for now.
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There are many unknowns. The Mate 60 was successful and could run Android apps. While the Chinese state may have a geopolitical strategy to support Huawei and SMIC, the average Chinese consumer may think otherwise. So may app developers over time. Propaganda filling YouTube with enticing videos from channels with triple-digit subscriber counts makes further migration to new chip nodes sound like a done deal, but that’s not really the case. And true sustainable parity depends on access to global markets with competitive, cutting-edge products. There’s no sign of that.
That may never happen. Smartphones built entirely on Chinese hardware, running closed Chinese operating systems, and relying on Chinese services in a Chinese cloud don’t seem to fit our geopolitics. As long as the Chinese state remains unaccountable, authoritarian, and obsessed with power over its own people, there will be limits to how much harmony can be achieved in the future. ®
