Huawei Wants To Take Homegrown HarmonyOS Phone Platform Worldwide (theregister.com) 41
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. "We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world," Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week. Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.
"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps -- and thousands of other apps -- up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS.
It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.
"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps -- and thousands of other apps -- up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS.
It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.
Product bundle (Score:1)
Maybe they can bundle it with China's shitty vehicles.
Bonus: give the EU something else to bitch about.
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Article isn't about shitty U.S. products.
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Who is butt hurt? I have no love of the U.S. auto industry. I think it sucks. I certainly wouldn't want to buy an American car, virtually regardless of price.
We bought a new car in September. The only manufacturers we were even willing to consider were Toyota, Mazda and Honda. We ended up buying a Honda CRV.
As for China and its shitty cars....well, they're shitty cars. I wouldn't consider any vehicle made in China, unless it were so cheap I could just abandon it on the side of the road when it breaks d
Harmony will create disharmony (Score:1)
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I don't know. Yet.
Would Huawei nag me to give them my CC number?
If not, then it's already a step in right direction*.
*However short lived: Silicon Valley/Wall Street (with StateDep support) won't allow something like this to exist. Obviously.
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I thought it was a fork of Android
Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]...
From the linked article, "while for smartphones, tablets and Huawei Watch which uses both, the system operates by utilizing a Linux kernel subsystem and executing the AOSP code with a modified EMUI user interface, enabling Android apps and HarmonyOS apps to run seamlessly through a compatibility layer in the userland outside the kernel"
AOSP code. Linux kernel. It's Android.
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Linux kernel. Linux ABI. It's Linux. (Yes, both can be true.)
It's not 'Homegrown' (Score:5, Informative)
People always call it 'Homegrown', I guess because that's what Huawei's press releases say and they're just parroting it back?
But Mainland China doesn't do anything from scratch. It's (extensively) modded Linux/Android - at least for the phones, which is why you can load APKs. On smaller devices it's based on LiteOS and there are other variations. Its like Proud Russian OS and Proud North Korean OS and (a couple other) Proud Chinese OS which are... yes, OpenBSD and Linux with a repaint.
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So, it becomes a 100% proprietary OS. Now the big question is, why should I trust a closed source OS from -anywhere-? If I wanted a closed source, embedded OS, I'd go with QNX, purely because the source code is available (although it is under a commercial license), and QNX predates Linux as being a top tier embedded OS. Heck, even MS switched to that in 2014 for Ford Sync stuff.
If I need a secure embedded OS, I'll go with INTEGRITY, which has had security from the kernel upwards for decades. If I needed
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You are right about iOS. I didn't include it because it isn't an OS used by anyone but Apple, and because of it, I didn't list it, as it isn't available for people who need an embedded OS to use for a platform.
Are open source operating systems more secure? That has been debated for decades. At least one has the ability to throw an AI scanner at the source code and have some assurance of safety, for the most part. Plus, even something like QNX has been around for decades, and if there were major show-sto
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If I wanted a closed source, embedded OS, I'd go with QNX, purely because the source code is available (although it is under a commercial license)
wat
If you can see the source code then it's not closed source, by definition.
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So what it is a fork? After forking they took the development on their own way.
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Weird that you would cite "Mainland China" here, when the same thing is entirely true of Western manufacturers.
Android is built on top of Linux, although to be fair the APIs are original.
Linux is a clone of Unix.
Unix is an evolution of Multics.
Apple iOS is built on BSD.
Turns out that nobody really writes stuff from scratch now, it's all built on something else.
As for "homegrown", if you buy some seeds that someone else grew and plant them yourself, I imagine you would probably call that homegrown. It's not
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Weird that you would cite "Mainland China" here, when the same thing is entirely true of Western manufacturers.
It's not weird because only China is claiming that their borrowed thing is homegrown. Everyone else is acknowledging the roots of their product. You don't have to call out lies when people tell the truth.
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Is "China" claiming that? I don't see Huawei hiding the fact that it is an Android derivative, in fact they are keen to point out to developers that it is easy to port their apps because of it.
The Google monopoly (Score:3)
The problem with Android OS is, 90% of apps are driven by advertizing: Correction, the problem is, Google deliberately hides the ad-free software. Porting Android apps to a clone OS won't fix that. Another problem is the phone/tablet ecosystem: Lack of device drivers or updates for old hardware, and monolithic OS updates . Again, porting won't fix that.
Then, there are problems outside the Google monopoly. The first problem is, will it be available in English? Since China is already full of English/Chinese applets, this should not be a problem. The other problem is, it will require a repository/marketplace which can send money to non-Chinese developers and also, it will be under Chinese law: The censorship and fickleness of Apple Store will be mild by comparison.
Re: The Google monopoly (Score:2)
In most parts of Asia, the standard for what counts as malware are much lower. The typical user tends to not even care if it steals any data so long as it doesn't drain their bank account or break something else. All that really matters to them is that it works.
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In most parts of Asia, the standard for what counts as malware are much lower. The typical user tends to not even care if it steals any data so long as it doesn't drain their bank account or break something else. All that really matters to them is that it works.
True and they also don't care whether it's a Huawei 'evil communist' phone that runs Chinese 'evil communist' software or an American 'liberty & patriotism' phone that runs American 'liberty & patriotism' software, as long as the damn thing works.
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Try F-Droid. All apps are open source and most are ad-free.
As for updates, Google fixed that years ago. They update all the OS components separately via the Play Store, the same as apps. It's only the OS kernel and other core parts that doesn't get updated, but that isn't a huge deal because any malware has to get through the layers of Android protections on top before it can touch the OS.
China based app store (Score:2)
If you have ever compared software designed for compliance with the local Chinese markets with the original non-Chinese versions it is sometimes clear how Chinese government restrictions can make the software less appealing or functional. When those restrictions are ap
more bans (Score:3)
I can see it working on China, where all the significant apps are/will be ported, but for the Western world, they will need Western apps to be ported and, sooner or later, I expect a law, order or such from the US government to ban developers from porting their apps to HarmonyOS.
Homegrown? (Score:1)
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Home grown? It's based on android and linux
Climb back under your rock and let the grownups comment on this one.
Adults agree, it's not home grown [slashdot.org]. Crawl back to China and collect your fifty cents, coward.
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Home grown? It's based on android and linux.. but they're moving away from android. They're likely violating open source licensing.
You should write a strongly worded letter to Xi Jinping.
Just what we need (Score:2)
As there are several countries other than US (Score:1)
As there are several countries other than US and China, yes there will be an international market for it, will it include the (currently) more affluent western countries, probably not, Asia, Africa, Middle east, South America I would guess.
99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps (Score:2)