Tech war: Huawei sees HarmonyOS breaking the dominance of Android and Apple's iOS in China

Huawei Technologies expects HarmonyOS to break the dominance of Western mobile operating systems in mainland China after its next version ends support for Android apps.

That iteration, called HarmonyOS Next, will be a "China-originated, independent and controllable" operating system, Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said at the company's developer conference on Friday.

The Shenzhen-based company launched at the conference a beta version of HarmonyOS Next for developers, with a beta upgrade for consumers expected in August.

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The mobile platform upgrade will be officially launched for commercial use on Huawei's next flagship 5G smartphone series, the Mate 70, in the fourth quarter this year, Yu said at the conference.

Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies' consumer business group, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Shenzhen on June 21, 2024. Photo: Weibo alt=Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies' consumer business group, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Shenzhen on June 21, 2024. Photo: Weibo>

The latest announcements by Huawei show that it is trying to bolster HarmonyOS' presence in the country, after unseating Apple's iOS as the second-biggest mobile operating system on the mainland in the first quarter.

With HarmonyOS, Yu said that it took just 10 years for Huawei to achieve what its Western counterparts did over 30 years in building a new operating system.

Huawei also claimed that HarmonyOS has surpassed the Linux kernel, the foundation of the Android mobile platform, with a 10-per cent performance improvement.

HarmonyOS was launched as an alternative to Android in August 2019, three months after the US government added Huawei to its Entity List. Under this trade blacklist, Huawei is barred from buying software, chips and other US-origin technologies from suppliers without Washington's approval.

Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies' consumer business group, presents the various applications of HarmonyOS at the company's annual developer conference in Shenzhen on June 21, 2024. Photo: Weibo alt=Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies' consumer business group, presents the various applications of HarmonyOS at the company's annual developer conference in Shenzhen on June 21, 2024. Photo: Weibo>

There are currently more than 900 million devices that run on HarmonyOS, with more than 2.5 million developers creating apps for the platform, Yu said on Friday.

The adoption of HarmonyOS has accelerated on the back of rapid growth in Huawei's smartphone shipments. The Pura 70 series, the company's latest flagship smartphone line launched in late April, saw shipments grow 68 per cent at the end of May, compared to the previous P series in the same period last year, according to Yu.

Shipments of Huawei's flagship Pura 70 line and Mate 60 series, which was launched last year, grew 72 per cent in the first five months of the year, Yu said.

Huawei ranked fourth in China's smartphone market in the first quarter with a 15.5 per cent share and sales growth of nearly 70 per cent, according to a report by Counterpoint Research.

The company has made the build-up of the HarmonyOS' app ecosystem "a crucial task for Huawei in 2024", the firm's rotating chairman Eric Xu Zhijun said in April.

Huawei has partnered with various large enterprises on the mainland in developing HarmonyOS-based apps. These include Alibaba Group Holding, Meituan, Ant Group, JD.com and McDonald's China. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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