While Chinese tech giant Huawei’s recent smartphone launches have been closely watched for signs of progress in China’s chip supply chain, the company has also developed expertise in sectors vital to Beijing’s vision of technological self-sufficiency, from operating systems to car software.
Chinese President Xi Jinping told the CPC Politburo last year that China must fight hard to localise operating systems and other technologies “as soon as possible” as the US restricts exports of advanced chips and other components.
OpenHarmony, developed by Huawei, is widely promoted in China as the “national operating system”.
“This strategic move is likely to erode the market share of Western operating systems such as Android and Windows in China as local products gain traction,” Sunny Cheung, an associate fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a US defence policy group, told Reuters.
In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei’s own version of the HarmonyOS operating system overtook Apple’s iOS to become the second best-selling mobile operating system in China after Android, according to research firm Counterpoint. It has not yet been released on smartphones outside China.
“Harmony has created a strong core operating system for the future of China’s devices,” Richard Yu, president of Huawei’s consumer business group, said at the opening of a developer conference last week.
Self-sufficiency
Huawei first introduced Harmony in August 2019, three months after Washington imposed trade restrictions over alleged security concerns. Huawei denies that its equipment poses a risk.
Since then, China has stepped up its self-sufficiency efforts, pulling out of the main code-sharing centre Github and supporting a local version, Gitee.
China banned the use of Windows on government computers in 2014 and now uses mostly Linux-based operating systems.
Microsoft derives only 1.5 per cent of its revenue from China, its chief executive said this month.
Originally built on an open-source Android system, Huawei this year released the first “pure” version of HarmonyOS, which no longer supports Android-based apps, further separating China’s app ecosystem from the rest of the world.
Huawei said in its 2023 annual report that OpenHarmony was the fastest-growing open source operating system for smart devices last year, with more than 70 organisations contributing to it and more than 460 hardware and software products produced in the financial, education, aerospace and industrial sectors.
Visited by Reuters, Charlie Cheng, deputy director of the Harmony Ecosystem Innovation Centre, said the aim of making it open-source was to replicate Android’s success in eliminating licensing costs for users and provide companies with a customisable springboard for their own products.
“Harmony will definitely become a mainstream operating system and give the world a new choice of operating systems besides iOS and Android,” he said.
Google, Apple and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.
China’s previous efforts to build large open source projects have struggled to gain traction among developers, but Huawei’s growing smartphone market share and extra work to develop a broader ecosystem gives Harmony an edge, analysts said.
Huawei’s Yu said this month that more than 900 million devices, including smartphones, watches and car systems, were running HarmonyOS and that 2.4 million developers were coding in the ecosystem.
“OpenHarmony will need more time and iterations for these developers to feel more confident about working with OpenHarmony,” Emma Xu, an analyst at research firm Canalys, told Reuters, adding: “But the reputation, behaviour and trust that HarmonyOS has achieved will certainly have a positive impact.”
