Last Updated: 24th July, 2022
Huawei‘s home-made multi-device operating system has been developed – HarmonyOS – Has the ability to become China‘s ‘National OS,’ said an industry specialist.
“Huawei incorporates a massive chance to scale the OS in China across multiple device categories and to create a sturdy developer community because the Chinese government is pushing for a ‘national OS’ in a bid to lessen the dependents on Google and Microsoft,” Neil Shah, Research Director at Counterpoint Technology, Market Research for Devices and Ecosystems.
Chinese web players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have developed OS’s hinge on the android before however it didn’t kick off.
If the administration pushed alternative huge Chinese brands like Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi to develop not solely smartphones, however additionally different product like TVs, he said then HarmonyOS can scale across and it’ll become more enticing for developers to develop apps. Chinese brands hold over 400th of the smartphone market share globally.
Huawei had 15.8 percent, and Oppo had 8.1 percent, Vivo had 7.5 percent, Lenovo had 2.6 percent, and Realme had 1.3 percent as of the second quarter of this year, as shown by Counterpoint.
The Future Of OS Is The Microkernel Architecture, HarmonyOS
Shah said HarmonyOS is quite obstructive for the industry in China and studied at the architecture; it’s quite versatile because it’s a microkernel and opened the platform for its competitors as well.
“Microkernel architecture seems to be the future of the OS and Huawei is the first significant vendor of OS to embrace it on a bigger scale. Google is also planning for micro-kernel architecture in its in-development Fuchsia OS. Huawei has learned the shortcomings from the present OS architectures like Android’s monolithic kernel and Apple’s fragmented OS approach to develop a distributed and versatile microkernel architecture,” he said.
The Chinese company aforementioned that the OS version 2.0 of its microkernel is going to be released next year whereas version 3.0 arrives in 2021. When the time is just perfect and Huawei has a lot of developers developing apps for HarmonyOS, Shah went on to say developers could take complete benefit of the microkernel architecture’s scalability.
Huawei is that the biggest player in China in terms of mobile devices and also the web of things devices.
Bigger In Scope For Scale In China
Shah said that launching smartphones in China with HarmonyOS has a bigger scope for scale as there is no Android’s Google Mobile Service makes use of its cloud services in China as well as Huawei.
“Huawei has to develop a powerful OS on the Chinese market over the next three to four years and have made sure it’s mature enough to go down the stretch and make Honor the launch of HarmonyOS brands and flood the market with various HarmonyOS products,” he said.
In the past, Samsung has done a similar job. Samsung had used Tizen for low-end smartphones, however didn’t kick off, however, the Korean marketer uses it currently for smart watches, TVs and other white goods.
#HarmonyOS is built with a deterministic latency engine that gives a smooth interactive experience. That means latency is at a minimum; bringing fluid interactive experience to the maximum #HDC2019 pic.twitter.com/p9bnwNHJq6
— Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) August 9, 2019
Huawei already features a growing wearable, IoT and automotive business, all of which could be powered by HarmonyOS.
So, Shah aforementioned that Huawei can have an identical strategy wherever Google doesn’t have that a lot to play.
“Huawei doesn’t wish to upset Google, however they must proliferate the Chinese market with HarmonyOS smartphones within the next 3 to four years,” he said.
In addition, he said there was opportunity for Samsung and LG, whose market shares in China are far less than 1%, to implement HarmonyOS in order to increase their market share in China.
Huawei Will Be Under Pressure From Developers
He said TVs, smart watches, smartphones, and the tablets will see a greater proliferation over the next five years, and then in-car infotainment and electric vehicles. China’s BYD is that the biggest electric automobile manufacturer in the world and that they may additionally form an alliance with Huawei.
In 2022, HarmonyOS can acquire AR, VR and other head-mounted devices.
The market has already seen various smartwatch platforms (Fitbit OS, Android Wear, WatchOS, Tizen, etc.), smart TV (Android TV, Linux, WebOS, Tizen and others), IoT segments (RTOS flavours, LiteOS, Linux, mbedOS and more).
So, Shah aforementioned an open-source and sturdy microkernel-based OS platform has the potential to drive enthusiasm in the non-smartphone space yet. While most of the large developers on board are situated in China, Shah said Huawei would come under pressure from outside China, attracting app developers and they have to do it alone.
Huawei Mobile Services connect over 910,000 global developers and 100m users outside of China.
If the Chinese brands take the open HarmonyOS route and build two or three mobile phones globally, Shah said developers will then have more scale to create HarmonyOS apps than Apple or Samsung play stores.
So I Tested The Honor Vision With Huawei’s Harmony OS
Huawei’s new OS, Harmony, is official and the first product to run it is the Honor Vision. Follow me on Instagram @bensgadgetreviews On Twitter @nextgadgetup #honorvision #huawei #harmonyOS
However, he aforesaid, that the sole challenge is that Apple and Google took almost a decade to reinforce and launch its app stores in various markets in terms of security.
So, he aforesaid, that Huawei can realize it’s tough to keep up the app store and in several countries, localization of apps, to get developers to optimize apps for HarmonyOS and integrate other monetization options via Harmony SDKs at a scale which other OS vendors, such as Microsoft with Windows Phone, couldn’t do it.
Google has achieved a phase where many languages are supported, but Shah hopes Huawei will take approximately five to six years to achieve that level.
Consequently, he said that other Chinese teams would have to embrace HarmonyOS as it would also offer them several leverage over Google.
HarmonyOS: Opportunity To Bolster Business Services
The heart of the Android platform is the GMS, whereas other than third-party app stores, each OEM have its cloud services and app stores.
Most of the individuals in China use a few of apps because it is restricted. Half of the individuals spent their time on WeChat and others on Baidu and Alibaba for shopping and searching, aside from gaming.
So, if anyone needs GMS, they will download the APK file and sideload it.
“Anyone might sideload it and Google can earn revenue if somebody watches a video on HarmonyOS. The only issue is that Google won’t have that abundant management it had on android and can’t collect tons of user information because it isn’t linked to the Google ID,” he said.
Samsung’s Tizen is a competitor to Android, but some of the Goggle apps work on Samsung TVs.
In the end, Shah aforementioned that Google, Microsoft and Facebook don’t hassle regarding the platform as long as they create revenue out of it.
With HarmonyOS, he aforesaid, that Huawei has a chance to spice up its services business – Huawei Cloud, HiLink, Music, Video and others.