Always under American sanctionsHuawei continues its merry way in its native country and now offers a viable alternative to the mobile systems of Apple and Google.
Once king of the mobile market, Huawei has experienced an unprecedented decline since 2018, the year the United States imposed a very strict embargo on the Chinese manufacturer. But while we thought the manufacturer’s mobile branch was dead and buried, the telecommunications giant proved that they could get by without the help of Qualcomm, Google or ARM… in its native country at least.
Huawei breaks the Apple/Google duopoly
As detailed by the Nikkei Asia media in a recent article, the manufacturer’s alternative operating system, nicknamed HarmonyOS, is eating away at the dominance of Android and iOS in China. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the mobile OS accounted for 16% of the market share in the country, a figure not so far from that of Apple which monopolizes around 20% of the Chinese mobile fleet with iOS and its iPhones.
On the global market, HarmonyOS represents almost 4% of the market share, according to the Counterpoint Research institute. A figure certainly well below the 74% of Android, but Huawei has still managed to show constant growth since the release of its mobile operating system. Enough to give buttons to Microsoft and BlackBerry who have never managed to break the iOS/Android duopoly on the mobile market. Even the Chinese giant Alibaba had broken its teeth trying to compete with the two giants.
Promises of protectionism
This beautiful niche that the manufacturer has managed to carve out for HarmonyOS now makes it possible to attract development teams to its platform. HarmonyOS, which would be based, like Android, on a Linux kernel, now has more than 4,000 compatible applications. A thousand more should arrive very soon to reach the critical threshold of 5,000 applications. A figure which would cover, according to Huawei, “99% of mobile uses» and which would therefore allow Huawei to calmly begin its definitive divorce from Android.
To boost the popularity of its mobile OS, Huawei has joined forces with various Chinese universities to train developers in its ecosystem. The manufacturer also claims that software development for HarmonyOS could create more than 3 million jobs. Enough to seduce the Chinese government with promises of economic protectionism symmetrical to those made by the United States.
This also creates an increasingly significant gap between the Chinese mobile ecosystem and that of the rest of the world.
Source : Nikkei
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