Huawei to Take HarmonyOS Worldwide

Huawei to Take HarmonyOS Worldwide

Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies.

The Chinese tech megacorp released its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that US sanctions blocked Huawei from having further access to Google's Android software to power its devices.

More recently, the company saw its Mate 60 Pro smartphone become the top selling device in China's huge consumer market, displacing rivals such as Apple's iPhone. It also has a newer device, the Pura 70, that could pose a bigger threat to Apple sales in the country.

Now Huawei has set its sights on international expansion and intends to spend 2024 building up the native HarmonyOS app ecosystem, including bringing the most popular smartphone apps to its platform.

Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.

"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said.

According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain.

"Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps – and thousands of other apps – up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed.

According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS has seen high growth thanks to the introduction of 5G smartphones powered by it, such as the Mate 60 Pro. The platform accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China, which Counterpoint said makes this the third largest mobile operating system by handset sales, behind Android and iOS.

Whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS devices outside of China is open to debate: repeated sanctions and negative publicity from the US and governments in Europe has left the brand with a hill to climb in both the world of business and consumer land.

[Tewbum]

The USA won't like this one little bit, but this is progress and it's the future in operating systems, good luck to them

[abidhasan]

I love Huawei. I'm using since 2 years.

[jayjaywoodland]

Yes... this is good news... this could be a selling point for brics too, if incorporated.
this will inspire nations to digital-decolonize their cloud services from hegemony nations' rents.
make/transfer all the competing apps to the new os as well as the store itself (completely independent)

[KaiserHooray]

We need alternatives to evade the Anglo Empire's spying.

[ParissaKhoury]

This is great news and one more nail in the coffin for hegemony of United States