Ebony and Ivory living with perfect Harmony
Reading about Harmony, it triggered the memory of the famous song by Sir Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.
Which kind of Harmony, you ask? I mean HarmonyOS. That’s the operating system developed by Huawei and it won't definitely be part of any harmonious relationship, though it might get into a war. The weapon of choice? Your mobile phone.
Nokia had Symbian. Blackberry phones had Blackberry OS. Microsoft had a few cute attempts at creating a smartphone OS and there was the Windows Phone (until there wasn’t). In the end, today we have Apple and Android.
What’s the difference between them? Apple’s OS works only on their own devices. In contrast, Google’s Android OS was made to work with everything else. That helped companies like Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi, LG and few others to start producing phones in mega-millions.
But let's not forget Huawei. It is right there at the top - or was, until recently. Due to Huawei’s activities it has drawn the attention of the US government, which resulted in several bans and restricted US companies dealing with them. (The Huawei ban timeline is nicely covered in this article by CNet.)
One of the bans included is the use of the 'free' Android OS made by Google. Huawei decided to build its own OS called Harmony. This is where things will get interesting. It’s one thing to build a new OS from scratch, but in order to make it successful, you have to have applications running on it. You need developers!!!!!!!
Ask Microsoft how to do that properly. Once Microsoft built MS DOS, Mr. Gates realized that to stay there he needed an army of people to cement its position with application. Microsoft knew how to recruit them.Both Apple and Google followed the model successfully. It still blows my mind why Blackberry screwed that up so badly.
Back to Huawei and building the operating system from scratch. If you check out HarmonyOS’ Wikipedia article, you might find this funny section:
Huawei claimed that HarmonyOS is a microkernel-based, distributed OS that is completely different from Android and iOS. However, it was later revealed that HarmonyOS 1.0 was based on Android 9 and supported ADB, the Android Debug Bridge. In September 2020, it was found that HDC, the debug bridge in HarmonyOS 2.0, was again based on ADB. A video of HarmonyOS 2.0 developer beta running on mobile was then posted, showing that the beta was just the same as Android 10 and no significant changes have been made in the name of HarmonyOS operating system. An independent review of HarmonyOS by Ars Technica found that HarmonyOS 2.0 is based on Android 10. The Android System icon, multiple Android system components and references was found within HarmonyOS 2.0. Huawei's SDK for the operating system, DevEco Studio, is also made up of the same components of Google's Android Studio.
So much building stuff from scratch! I think we will hear more about Google vs. Huawei infringement lawsuits in near future.
What about the apps that are supposed to work on HarmonyOS, you ask? That's an even bigger problem. You can copy the software. But how do you convince an army of developers to suddenly port all your applications to a new, unproven operating system with a very limited number of customers?
As a stopgap, the Chinese government might draft people domestically to build the apps and mandate the use of Huawei phones in China. That will just mask its inability to innovate.
Unless the US administration lifts the ban on technology for Huawei, its mobile phone business is done. A phone without apps is just that -- a phone. And nobody uses that anymore. Huawei is moving to IoT and electric cars. Let's see how long that will last, if HarmonyOS can’t find its footing.
Building your business on someone's else IP and with government protection always ends badly.
And that's a recurrent pattern.