A snub to American sanctions? Huawei, the former Chinese champion of smartphones, will launch on Tuesday November 26 its alternative to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, “HarmonyOS Next”, reports the Financial Timesthis Monday, November 25. Its operating system, which it designed from A to Z, will equip its Mate 70. Huawei hopes that HarmonyOS Next will become the third reference operating system, alongside iOS and Android.
Also read: HarmonyOS NEXT: how Huawei wants to get rid of Android for good
This announcement should mark the end of the desert crossing of the former world number 1 in smartphones. In 2020, the Chinese company fell to the bottom of the ranking after the first American sanctions imposed a year earlier. The United States then accused it of copying its American champions, while being in the pay of Beijing, in the midst of the Sino-American trade war: allegations strongly refuted by the company which repeatedly advocated its independence.
Huawei forced to develop its own system since American sanctions
Blacklisted in May 2019, Huawei no longer had the right to purchase components or services when American technology was used. Gone are the Gmail, Maps, and YouTube apps, the latest generation chips, but also the Android system, must-haves that the Chinese company had undertaken to rebuild or develop on its own.
Also read: How the United States deprived China of semiconductors… for better and for worse
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Initially, the group deployed a first version of HarmonyOS, based on the open source code of Android.
Also read: Huawei unveils HarmonyOS, a universal operating system to replace Android
This had allowed Android applications to work on its smartphones. At the same time, the group of Shenzhen had launched itself in all directions into the development of “HarmonyOS Next”, its in-house operating system. At the same time, application developers had to adapt their applications to work with this new system. The whole question is which apps will be present in the Huawei application store.
The new system not yet fully developed?
According to a source from our colleagues, the company focused on the most used applications in China, such as Tencent’s WeChat (messaging), Alibaba’s Taobao (marketplace), or Meituan ( meal delivery). But there would still be many holes in the racket. According to users of the beta version of the operating system and certain developers interviewed by the financial daily, Next is not yet completely ready. Of the 15,000 apps, basic features would not work.
« We cannot support WeChat Pay in our app yet. Baidu’s SDK is also not supported so we cannot use Baidu’s localization service », Regrets, for example, a developer working on an application compatible with Next for a large public group, cited by our colleagues. As a result, the latter recognizes that these shortcomings will constitute “ a problem for Huawei’s new smartphone ». He advises anyone who already owns smartphones from the Chinese brand not to update them.
A system that will improve thanks to its users, according to Huawei
But Huawei is counting on its users to improve its system, even if everything is not perfect. According to Eric Xu, the president of Huawei, “ operating systems and ecosystems thrive through their use. Only when more and more consumers accept and use HarmonyOS can the system and applications quickly evolve and improve, allowing it to enter a virtuous cycle “, he declared during a trade show last weekend, quoted by our colleagues.
According to experts, Huawei should do well in China where the company has a large number of users. But for Rich Bishop, head of a company that launches international applications in China, “ it will always be difficult to get buy-in from international developers ».
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