A Huawei phone store in Warsaw, Poland in March (Photo/Chen Qingqing/GT)
Huawei's proprietary operating system (OS) will be launched this fall at the earliest and no later than spring 2020, a senior company executive disclosed earlier this week. The move reflects Huawei's strategy to become independent and find alternative suppliers as the U.S. imposes further sanctions against the Chinese high-technology giant, one expert said.
With this strategy in place, Huawei's dependence on U.S. partners must ebb in the long run, and that will be a blow to many U.S. companies, the expert noted.
"Our homegrown OS is likely to be launched this fall, or no later than spring 2020," Richard Yu Chengdong, head of Huawei's consumer business, said on Tuesday.
"We're willing to continue using Google and Microsoft [software], but we have no other choice [than to develop our own system]," Yu said, according to a document viewed by the Global Times.
Domestic OS-themed shares surged on Wednesday in the Chinese mainland, with companies like Shanghai-based Wondertek and Ningbo Bird rising by the 10 percent daily limit.
But in some ways, Huawei's choice reflects the backward development of China's OS industry in general. Huawei is unable to find an OS developer in China that's good enough for its products, so it has to develop the OS itself, Fu Liang, a veteran telecom industry observer in Beijing, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
According to Fu, the OS developed in China are mostly the products of "small workshops" and lag far behind in influence, user scale and continuing updates compared with major international OS like Google's Android and Apple's iOs.
"Many of those domestic operating systems are developed by academic institutions, but they can't win the market. I think behind this situation is a shortage of investment, whether in research and development or in talents," Fu said.
With the Huawei OS on the horizon, will change occur?
"I think it will be a revolution in the domestic OS industry," Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
For one thing, Huawei's technologies, such as data storage capabilities, are good enough to design an OS with faster reaction capabilities and higher efficiency, making up for some of the shortcomings of traditional international OS, such as presenting better compatibility features than Android.
"More importantly, Huawei has products to back up its OS, while most of the domestic OS don't. For Huawei, its OS will be tested by the large pool of Huawei users who will give feedback, and it will be easy for Huawei to find flaws in the OS and update it, pushing it to a mature stage through market experimentation," Xiang said.
Yu from Huawei disclosed that the new Huawei OS will be a comprehensive system used in smartphones, PCs, tablets, TVs, automobiles and smart wearable devices, and it will also be compatible with all Android apps.
Some domestic media reported on Monday that Huawei's proprietary smart phone OS is undergoing trials and will gradually replace the Android system.
A source close to the matter confirmed to the Global Times Huawei's schedule to launch its own OS.
But Fu was guarded about the influence of this new smartphone OS made by Huawei, because many of the OS details have not been disclosed yet.
"Also, for OS, it's relatively hard for newcomers to win the market as customers have more or less become familiar with the market pioneers. The question also remains as to whether Huawei can get enough support from other domestic mobile phonemakers and application developers that are willing to embrace its OS," Fu said.
But he acknowledged that with such efforts as making its own OS and mobile phone chips, Huawei will be emboldened to withstand the U.S. sanctions amid the ongoing trade war, and its reliance on U.S. suppliers will diminish gradually.
Google said in a note it sent to the Global Times on Tuesday that the temporary 90-day license, a window given by the Trump administration that allows Huawei to continue purchasing U.S.-made goods in order to maintain existing networks, allows it to continue to provide software updates and security patches to existing (Huawei) models.
It didn't mention whether it would cut supplies to Huawei after that period. On Sunday Beijing time, Google reportedly revoked Huawei's Android license for part of its services. The move was considered a catastrophe to the overseas business of the Chinese company.
The development also made China realize how important proprietary core technologies are and how urgent it is to accelerate technology self-reliance.
