Huawei’s HarmonyOS Next: An Android & iOS Challenger?

In telecoms, all eyes are on Shenzhen for the impending launch of Huawei’s Mate 70 smartphone.
As Beijing continues to uncouple its tech industry from the West, the handset is expected to showcase made-in-China chips and HarmonyOS NEXT, a new homegrown mobile operating system designed to make the world’s formerly biggest smartphone maker even more self-reliant.

Operating systems become ecosystems, creating trillion-dollar app marketplaces and influencing the balance of power between hardware OEMs, software partners, and retailers.

What might a new entrant from the world’s biggest mobile marketplace mean for the iOS/Android duopoly?

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Taking on Apple & Android
3. HarmonyOS NEXT will add a third contender for smartphone OS dominance.
4. Early Reviews Are In
5. The Market Opportunity
6. Huawei's Successful Fightback Should Worry Competitors
7. The Bottom Line
8. FAQs
9. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Taking on Apple & Android
3. HarmonyOS NEXT will add a third contender for smartphone OS dominance.
Show Full Guide
4. Early Reviews Are In
5. The Market Opportunity
6. Huawei's Successful Fightback Should Worry Competitors
7. The Bottom Line
8. FAQs
9. References

Taking on Apple & Android

Gearheads will be chomping at the bit to get a look at what’s under the Mate 70’s slick 6.69″ display. Much of the trade tension between Beijing and Washington has focused on chips, so expect a slew of teardown reports testing the specs and assessing the progress China has made in building its own processors.

A viable domestic chip industry will help end reliance on Western tech, the thinking goes, but the handset’s software may prove more significant than the hardware.

The Mate 70 is expected to run on HarmonyOS NEXT, Huawei’s new self-made operating system. If it does, it will mark a new milestone in China’s long flight away from underlying technologies the rest of the planet takes for granted.

When the last Trump administration’s punishing trade sanctions kicked off in 2018, Beijing turbocharged efforts to make China technologically self-sufficient.

In strategically important industries like automotive, agriculture, clean energy, and technology, the country’s leaders saw Western control over key components and software as a national security risk.

Time has only stiffened their resolve, but China’s mobile handset market is still dominated by made-in-the-USA operating systems. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS are a de facto duopoly running close to 98% of the world’s smartphones – including China’s.

Huawei has been in the spotlight throughout, earning the ire of US politicians and competitors for a long list of alleged bad behaviors. Now it’s punching back.

That’s a notable departure from version 4, which was Android compatible and allowed developers to reskin existing apps and port them over.

HarmonyOS NEXT says goodbye to all that, requiring even wildly-popular Chinese apps like WeChat to be completely re-written. A bold move, but will it work?

Early Reviews Are In

Early tests shared on social media point to HarmonyOS NEXT’s super-fluid interface, which instantly responds to every tap, pull or swipe with emotive transitions and animations.

HarmonyOS NEXT
Smoothness demo

Animations and fluidity are being considered as a selling point by some manufacturers now. pic.twitter.com/pbkYAjV4RI

— Alvin (@sondesix) November 1, 2024

Apps can be opened and closed at lightning speed.

Last phases of Harmony os next beta.
80 apps open in 44 seconds
Huawei is coming back for its crown 💪 pic.twitter.com/RKdmU40rqM

— Harmony_HM OS (@OS_Harmony_) October 15, 2024

The camera zoom speed and resolution both look slightly upgraded.

HarmonyOS 4.2 (left) vs HarmonyOS Next/5.0 (right) camera zoom test #harmonyosnext #huawei #camera #test #zoom #camerazoom pic.twitter.com/ApT36wKnLM

— Living In Harmony 👑 (@LivingInHM25) November 7, 2024

Some testers have touted the system’s microkernel architecture, which promises better performance, security, and more efficient resource management than iOS or Android.

A few bugs have been reported, but then finding bugs is what beta testing is all about. For the most important signals about the new OS’ odds of success, smartphone tech gurus are watching its WeChat integration.

The importance of WeChat to Huawei’s plans can’t be overstated. With 1.3 billion users globally, at least 80% of China’s population uses the app for a wide array of services, including payments, shopping, social media, messaging, and more.

Vivian Toh, a Singapore-based tech journalist and co-founder of Tech Tech China, recently wrote that the initial WeChat experience on HarmonyOS NEXT ‘leaves much to be desired.’ The test version is core-function only and lacks popular features like WeChat’s native search engine, AI translation, a TikTok-like short video platform, and some financial services.

“This limited functionality is raising eyebrows, especially considering how crucial the large domestic app’s adaptation is for Huawei’s plans.”

The Market Opportunity

Even for a company with Huawei’s resources and track record, building a new operating system is a moonshot ambition.

“Developing a competitive operating system is probably the greatest challenge a vendor can face,” says Runar Bjørhovde, an analyst with telecoms research firm Canalys. He told Techopedia that success “will require platform dynamics. It needs to attract developers and end-users to thrive – both which can be very costly.”

Winning over software developers is essential. They need to be convinced that the system will work, that take-up will be significant, and that building a dedicated app for it will be worth the time and effort.

“There have been many attempts at launching operating systems over the last two decades, including Windows OS, Tizen OS, Symbian, Linux and Yun OS. All of which failed, and the operating system market is a duopoly,” Bjørhovde notes. “That’s why app makers generally stick with the incumbents.”

But even if the cards are stacked against Huawei, it does receive a lot of home support, which has helped it progress with its initiatives in the last years – both on OS development as well as semiconductors.

“This has also resulted in Huawei making a strong comeback in its home market and has been the 2nd largest vendor in China from January to September this year,” he adds.

“Outside China, Huawei’s business is very small, depending mainly on a few markets,” he said. “It will now look to see if there is any potential for reinvesting there in efforts to grow its smartphone business.”

Huawei’s Successful Fightback Should Worry Competitors

Does Huawei’s new OS stand a chance? The company has withstood a decade’s worth of Western trade and regulatory punishments and come up winning. Don’t count them out.

In 2012 the US government suggested that the Chinese government might pressure Huawei to use its telecoms equipment business and presumed access to secret communications to engage in spying on Beijing’s behalf.

Then, in 2018, the firm’s CFO (and daughter of Huawei’s founder) was indicted for breaching Washington’s trade sanctions against Iran.

By 2020, the conflict had escalated into an intensive trade war, with a ban on most Huawei products in the US and overseas firms barred from selling the company any computer chips or equipment that uses American technology. Washington diplomats went into a full-court press to convince other countries to keep Huawei products out of their telecommunications networks.

Huawei felt the pain. More than a dozen nations barred it from bidding for mobile broadband network contracts, and it had to offload its flagship smartphone brand when America’s chokehold on chips cut off its supply.

By 2021, revenues had cratered by more than 30%. A letter to staff from the company’s CEO said Huawei was ‘fighting for its life.’

The conflict shows no signs of abating, especially with Donald Trump’s second successful White House bid. But Huawei has weathered the storm and re-positioned for growth.

The firm’s year-on-year net profits for Q1 2024 grew a whopping 564%.

It’s back in the smartphone business, and sales in the telecoms equipment division are rising. Success is down to a strategy of repatriating and re-shoring, ditching foreign tech for home-grown software and hardware.

In 2020, Huawei was the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer and the number one provider of telecoms network equipment. Can it get there again?

Toby Zhu, an analyst at Canalys’ Shanghai office, wrote in May that Huawei had now joined the rush to add generative AI capabilities to smartphones.

“Huawei wasn’t among the earliest vendors to emphasize GenAI features. But with the launch of the Pura 70 series in Mainland China and the subsequent introduction of its AI image eraser feature, Huawei has officially entered the GenAI smartphone market.”

HarmonyOS NEXT is key to its AI embrace, Zhu says, as it’s expected to embed AI capabilities at a system level, differentiating it from application-level AI features other smartphone vendors offer.

With an upgraded version of its Xiao Yi AI-powered smart assistant, the company could “gain a big head start in optimizing on-device AI model deployment and power consumption, as well as personalized and differentiated AI services and cross-device AI user experiences.”

The Bottom Line

Assuming the Mate 70 launch delivers, Huawei’s next move might be to convince other Chinese smartphone-makers to adopt the new OS. Its OpenHarmony (OHOS) initiative would enable domestic rivals like Xiaomi and Oppo to create HarmonyOS versions of their own.

Linda Sui, senior director, mobile end market research at TechInsights, told Techopedia that gaining ground on Android and iOS “depends on Huawei’s own smartphone business, which faces uncertainties and challenges in the short run, including stabilized iPhone performance in China, plus 4G and 5G chipset supply shortages and constraints.

She also notes that Chinese consumers may be experiencing ‘patriotism fatigue,’ something that helped Huawei launch the Mate 60 Pro last year.

Still, Huawei’s Harmony plans don’t stop on smartphones. The OS will soon work on laptops, an array of smart devices, and even some automobiles. Sui said:

“How to build up Huawei’s own ecosystem in China and bring HarmonyOS NEXT into overseas markets are the two key challenges ahead.”

FAQs