Huawei's Harmony seeks to eliminate China's dependency on Android and Windows

 

A drone, a bipedal robot, a grocery checkout, and other gadgets crammed into a tiny space provide a picture of China's software future in which Huawei, the country's top developer, has created an operating system that will supplant Windows and Android.

The collection is housed at the Harmony Ecosystem Innovation Centre, a government-owned organization in the southern city of Shenzhen. Open Harmony is an open-source operating system that Huawei introduced five years ago following the suspension of support for Google's Android by the United States. The center encourages governments, businesses, and hardware manufacturers to develop software using Open Harmony.

 

While China's semiconductor supply chain has been widely monitored for signs of progress in Huawei's recent successful smartphone launches, the business has also discreetly amassed competence in areas critical to Beijing's aim of technological self-sufficiency, from operating systems to in-vehicle software.

Amidst the U.S. crackdown on exports of sophisticated processors and other components, President Xi Jinping warned the powerful politburo of the Communist Party last year that China needed to fight a hard battle to localize operating systems and other technologies "as soon as possible".

 

 

Now, OpenHarmony is being heavily pushed as a "national operating system" in China due to worries that other big businesses may be cut off from the Android and Microsoft Windows products that are the foundation of many systems.

 

In China, "this strategic move will likely erode the market share of Western operating systems like Android and Windows, as local products gain traction," said Sunny Cheung, an associate fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S.Defense Policy Group.

 

 

Huawei's in-house operating system HarmonyOS overtook Apple's (AAPL.O) iOS in the first quarter of 2024 to take second place in China's mobile operating system sales after Android, according to research firm Counterpoint. Outside China, it has not been released for smartphones.

 

 

According to an internal memo and other publications, Huawei gave the OpenAtom Foundation, a nonprofit organization, the source code for OpenHarmony in 2020 and 2021, therefore Huawei no longer has authority over the company.

 

However, as parts of a larger Harmony ecosystem, the innovation center and official documentation frequently use the terms OpenHarmony and HarmonyOS interchangeably. Adoption of OpenHarmony will increase due to HarmonyOS's expansion, which is anticipated to launch in a PC version this year or next, according to experts.

 

Richard Yu, the chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, stated last week at the start of a developer conference that "Harmony has created a powerful foundational operating system for the future of China's devices."

Requests for more comments from Huawei were not answered.

Self-sufficiency

In August 2019, Huawei made its debut with Harmony, following three months of trade restrictions imposed by Washington on the company due to purported security issues. Huawei disputes that its products are dangerous.

 

Since then, China has intensified its attempts to become self-sufficient, isolating itself from the global Github code-sharing network and supporting Gitee, a local alternative.

 

Since 2014, China has prohibited the use of Windows on official computers, preferring to utilize Linux-based operating systems instead.

Microsoft's president stated last month that the country accounts for barely 1.5% of the company's total revenue.

This year, Huawei released its first "pure" version of HarmonyOS, which does not enable Android-based apps. This further divides China's app industry from the global community. HarmonyOS was first developed on an open source Android platform.

 

According to a Jamestown Foundation analysis published last month, OpenAtom, the company that owns OpenHarmony, seems to be organizing Chinese companies' attempts to provide a competitive alternative to American technologies, especially for defense applications like satellites.

 

Inquiries for comment by Beijing-based Open Atom were not responded to.

 

Sources available

 

According to Huawei's 2023 annual report, Open Harmony emerged as the fastest-growing open-source operating system for smart devices in the past year, with more than 70 organizations contributing to it and over 460 hardware and software solutions developed across the finance, education, aerospace, and industrial sectors.

 

The intention behind making it open source, according to Charlie Cheng, deputy manager of the Harmony Ecosystem Innovation Center, when Reuters visited, is to emulate Android's success in eliminating licensing fees for consumers and to provide businesses with a customizable launchpad for their own products.

 

"Harmony will definitely grow into a mainstream operating system, and will give the world a new choice of operating system besides iOS and Android," he stated. "China is learning from the West."

Requests for comments from Microsoft, Apple, and Google were not answered.

Strong support for the Harmony ecosystem has come from Shenzhen, the home city of Huawei, which has a history of serving as a test location for laws that are eventually implemented throughout China.

 

According to a Shenzhen center presentation, ten more Harmony centers are anticipated in an additional ten cities, in addition to the one that just opened in Chengdu, in the southwest.

 

Chinasoft and Shenzhen Kaihong Digital, led by Harmony's "godfather" and former Huawei employee Wang Chenglu, are important OpenHarmony developers. Both have experience working with mines in Shaanxi, China's largest coal-producing region, and at Tianjin Port developing infrastructure software.

OpenHarmony is mostly limited to China, but the Eclipse Foundation, an open-source organization based in Brussels, said that it is utilizing it to create a system called Oniro that will be used in smartphones and other internet-of-things devices.

 

Analysts noted that Harmony has an edge over prior Chinese attempts to construct large-scale open-source projects due to Huawei's expanding smartphone market dominance and further work to develop a wider ecosystem.

 

According to Huawei's Yu, this month, more than 900 million devices—including watches, cellphones, and vehicle systems—are using HarmonyOS, and 2.4 million developers were writing code inside the ecosystem.

 

According to Emma Xu, an analyst with the research firm Canalys, "Open Harmony will need more time and iterations so that these developers will be more confident to work with Open Harmony." "But the reputation, behavior and confidence that Harmony OS has achieved will definitely bring a positive effect."

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