By the end of 2024, Huawei should put itself a little further on the margins of the Western market: the new Xinghe version of HarmonyOS Next should no longer support Android applications.
The Chinese company Huawei, singled out by the USA for collusion with the Chinese communist regime, has no longer benefited from Android since 2019. Faced with this observation, the manufacturer has decided to launch its own OS, Harmony, present on all the smartphones offered by the company. Today, Huawei seems to want to go even further, by stopping support for Google Android applications by the end of 2024.
HarmonyOS Next will be the future of Huawei in China
It’s now official: Huawei will soon launch a beta program intended primarily for developers for its Xinghe version of Harmony OS Next. Scheduled between April and June, this new version should then be put into service for all Huawei users by the end of the year. To stick to this new announcement, the Chinese manufacturer was also able to organize a dedicated event to unveil its Preview version of HarmonyOS Next to all developers.
If HarmonyOS already represented the beginning of the divorce between Huawei and Western services (the Chinese company having launched HarmonyOS in disaster following the American government’s embargo on Android), HarmonyOS Next only confirms the distance taken by the manufacturer. Indeed, this new version only supports the Harmony core and dedicated Chinese applications: in other words, all Google Android applications should be completely banned from the firm’s smartphones.
An independence strategy completely supported by the manufacturer
If all Android applications will therefore now be inaccessible on Huawei devices, it will nevertheless be necessary to offer its users some sort of alternative, an offer sufficiently plethoric to convince in the long term. To reassure, Huawei is waging a war with numbers: according to the firm, already 200 applications native to Harmony have already been developed, and it hopes that more than 5,000 will be operational by the end of 2024. But how can we achieve a such a big figure over the period?
Huawei is choosing to be quantitative: the Chinese company collaborates with companies, universities and institutions in the country to train more than 100,000 Harmony developers each month. In other words, more than a million developers specializing in Huawei’s OS should be effective by the end of the year. To support this decision, $1.33 billion will be invested by the company to promote its native applications, but also its cloud services & software development kits.
Despite these massive projects, Huawei also maintains at the same time that these accusations of collusion with the Chinese regime are erroneous, and that the blacklisting of the company is motivated by political reasons.
Huawei may have been heavily impacted by American sanctions prohibiting it from using Google services on its smartphones, but the Chinese manufacturer is far from having said its last word. Indeed, it continues to design high quality phones with its operating system and its in-house interface: Harmony OS and EMUI. For those who are more cautious, Google services are still available on some Huawei smartphones. We take stock of our selection of the best Huawei smartphones of 2022.
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Source : Reuters
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