Imperfect Harmony
Huawei mobile phone owners could soon be in for a rude awakening, writes David Behrens.
With the disappearance in recent years of BlackBerry and Windows phones, pretty much every handset on the market now runs either Apple’s iOS operating system or Google’s rival, Android. But that’s about to change, and not necessarily for the better.
The decision by the Trump administration to place the Chinese manufacturer Huawei on the US trade restriction list is finally coming home to bite the millions of users who went out and bought one of its phones regardless. Google, you will recall, banned Huawei from installing its app store on any of its new products in the wake of the Trump decision, and since then users have had to put up with an inferior alternative.
But now, as it attempts to regain the ground it lost during the boycott, Huawei is abandoning Android altogether in favour of an operating system of its own – one that it hopes will establish a third force in the market.
The new system is called HarmonyOS, and Huawei plans to install it retrospectively on many of its existing phones over the next year – first in Asia and then here. If you have one of the 90 or so affected models, you will awake one morning to find your old Android interface gone.
The new system is based on those parts of Android that Google doesn’t control, so many elements are recognisably the same. Most Android apps will work on Harmony, as long as they don’t rely on Google services. That has been pretty much the case since the US boycott began. Huawei claims that freedom from Google also brings benefits, and that tweaks that were not possible under the old regime could bring faster performance and longer battery life to some phones. But it’s too early to say if this will make any noticeable difference in day-to-day use.
Is it an improvement overall? Not really. The new system doesn’t address the central issue of Google’s missing apps – maps, documents, photos and so on – and while that may not be the end of the world, it’s too much of an inconvenience to put up with when there are fully-functional phones from Huawei’s rivals at similar prices.
Chief among these are models bearing the names Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme and Vivo – all now available officially in the
UK and none affected by the US boycott. At just under £200, the Xiaomi Poco X3 Pro is a particular bargain, with four cameras, six gigabytes of memory and one of the fastest processors in its class. Further up the scale, the £380 OnePlus Nord is one of the best mid-range handsets on the market.
It’s worth noting that OnePlus uses an operating system called OxygenOS, and other brands use variants of their own – but don’t let the terminology confuse you. Unlike HarmonyOS, these are just cosmetically-tweaked versions of Android, with added proprietary apps of questionable value but none of the core functionality removed. This kind of rebranding has been the norm since Android launched a decade ago; no-one other than Huawei is trying to actually supplant it.
You can understand why. Not only does Harmony attempt to build a life after Google for its products, but it gives the company a common platform it can roll out across other devices without paying royalties. Samsung operates a similar model with its Tizen system, which it uses on its smartwatches and TVs, but not phones.
Huawei doesn’t make TVs but it does sell watches, and its recently-released thirdgeneration timepiece is the first to make use of the new system. It offers more apps than its predecessor, but is not radically different otherwise. And the watch version of Android, with its very limited battery life, has never felt ideal.
The phone version, however, is extremely good, and Huawei will find it hard to prove otherwise.
Huawei plans to install it retrospectively on many of its existing phones over the next year.