Huawei unveils Harmony operating system, but won’t ditch Android for smartphones
DONGGUAN, CHINA/HONG KONG Huawei Technologies unveiled on Friday its proprietary operating system for smartphones and other devices, as U.S. trade restrictions imposed in May threaten to cut the Chinese firm’s access to U.S. technologies such as Android.
Huawei said that for now it would stick to using Google’s Android for smartphones, and the new software will be gradually rolled out to support devices such as smartwatches, speakers and virtual reality gadgets.
The new OS is part of Huawei’s attempt to develop its own technologies from chips to software to reduce its reliance on U.S. firms amid an intensifying U.S.-China trade war.
President Donald Trump said on Friday that the United States was not going to do business with Huawei but that could change if there was a trade deal.
Huawei had previously given little information about the software, fuelling speculation about how quickly or effectively it could find an alternative to the Android system.
“Harmony OS is completely different from Android and iOS,” said Richard Yu, head of Huawei’s consumer business group referring to operating systems developed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc.
“You can develop your apps once, then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices,” he told a developers’ conference held in Dongguan in southern China, where Huawei has built a lavish new campus modelled on European towns.
President Trump’s administration has warned that Huawei could be a vehicle for Chinese espionage and put the company on a so-called “entity list,” meaning that U.S. corporations that conduct business with the telecoms giant now require special licences to do so.
Huawei’s Yu said the company has no updated knowledge on whether it can continue to use Android.
Huawei is not the first major tech company seeking to develop a robust ecosystem around its own software. Its bigger rival Samsung Electronics has been using its own operating system called Tizen in smartwatches and televisions.
But attempts by the South Korean firm to grow Tizen to challenge Android in smartphones have been thwarted by lack of support from developers. Marko Yang, an investor in developer studios who attended the conference, however, said he believed the size of the Chinese market would help Huawei overcome such a problem. Huawei says there are more than 800,000 developers in its product ecosystem.
“The Chinese market is huge, there are many users and they have many demands, and solving their demands will result in many apps, products, and when this happens it will, from the periphery, create a core ecosystem, and the Chinese market will go on to spur the overseas market,” Yang said.
Yu also said in order to attract developers, it was willing to cut its fee intake from app developers working for Harmony to as low as 10 per cent-15 per cent. Apple and Google take a 30 per cent cut for revenue generated through their app stores.