Although Huawei sold 240 million smartphones worldwide in 2019, the re-boosting of overseas markets and the speed of the ecosystem's hole-fixing will determine how far this company can go in the future.
At the recent Davos Winter Forum, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said that Harmony OS is online and will be applied to Huawei ’s mobile phones, tablets, and TVs in the future. This is Huawei's latest statement on Harmony OS.
Regarding Harmony OS, Wang Chenglu, president of Huawei's consumer business software department, once said that Huawei's mobile phones will still prefer Android, and Harmony OS will be used if it is not needed. In addition, Harmony OS is also in the process of continuous improvement and maturity, and is expected to be officially open sourced in August this year.
Another noteworthy action is that just recently, Huawei released a new low-profile version of the P30 Lite smartphone with Google applications overseas. Due to the upgrade of memory and storage capacity, the new version can still use Google applications, including Gmail , YouTube, Drive, Maps, and other software.
This approach is seen as a remedy for Huawei to regain market sales. In the short term, Huawei is still willing to consider Google as the first choice for overseas ecology. But from the speed of ecological hole filling, Huawei is obviously unwilling to just "passive" wait.
At about the same time, Huawei announced a £20 million investment plan in the UK to encourage British and Irish developers to integrate applications into the "HMS" Huawei mobile services ecosystem. In some Asia-Pacific countries, Huawei is also taking out "real money" to accelerate the implementation of this plan.
HMS, or Huawei Mobile Services, debuted at last year's Huawei Developer Conference and complemented Harmony OS. Similar to Google's GMS mobile service, HMS includes a set of open HMS Apps and HMS Core, HMS Capabilities, HMS Connect, and corresponding IDE tools for development and testing. Among them, HMS Apps include core applications consisting of cloud space, smart assistant, application market, wallet, video, music, reading and living services.
In the process of ecological hole filling, HMS is also regarded as a "fuel tank" inside Huawei terminals to support the rotation of the terminal's "new aircraft”.
In the latest set of published data, Huawei's global registered developers have exceeded 1.3 million, and the number of applications accessing HMS Core worldwide has exceeded 55,000. This figure is higher than the 1.01 million developments when HMS was first announced five months ago. 30% more, and the HMS Core 4.0 version is also officially launched recently.
In the new version, HMS has added some new capabilities, including machine learning services, context-aware services, unified code scanning services, short-range communication services, and panoramic services. However, Huawei has not given a clear signal as to whether it will replace Google with this ecosystem.
However, in his speech in the New Year 2020, Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun once stated that the construction and development of the HMS ecosystem is a necessary condition for overseas sales of smart terminals. In 2020, Huawei will make every effort to build an HMS ecosystem, support the sale of smartphones overseas, and promote innovation of application partners.
This seems to be a signal that no matter whether the physical list exists in the future, the accelerated construction of the HMS ecosystem has become an inevitable choice for Huawei terminals to break through the current difficulties and challenges.
Currently, HMS has 600 million active users in more than 170 countries, and 72 million European users, including the United Kingdom.
But this number still cannot shake Google's status.
Among the mobile operating systems, Google's Android system accounts for 74.85%, Apple's iOS accounts for 22.94%, and the remaining platforms account for less than 1%. Compared to the technology itself, consumer habits and perceptions are difficult to change in a short time.
For developers, Huawei has the most advantages in strong channel advantages and Huawei's current share in the terminal market.
Huawei's 240 million smartphone sales a year are expected to attract a large number of developers to try for HMS.
Although there is no Google's ability to dominate overseas, if there is sufficient concession in the distribution of benefits, more developers will embrace this ecology.
