Posted by rustyparkour 10/23/2024
A lot of Huawei gear is still installed and operating, as of today, in US telecom networks.
Even the pentagon is contracting with many companies using Huawei gear.
The telecom providers arguably put quite some pressure to maintain such a distinction, since they purchased and paid for said equipment.
But for i.e. Google it would have been a crime to provide dedicated technology access (early-access code, Google Services, etc.) for Huawei to then integrate into their products.
There were specific orders to remove Huawei from the telecom network (but yeah they were not followed) in 2019.
So the government didn't flip a switch and tell them to make it disappear. They expected it to be a staggered, eventual process.
I don’t see any problems here
1. After China made a turn toward authoritarianism with Xi, decoupling - especially on the telecom side - is a hard requirement. They are objectively a huge national security risk. 2. Competition is healthy. I don’t see any problems with having another space race or another OS competing on the international arena. 3. I’m not too worried about China threatening USA in the long run anyway. USA still attracts the best talent from all over the world, many of which end up settling there long term. (I’m not American, so saying this as an outsider). You cannot become a citizen in China, and that’s unlikely to change in an ultra-nationalist authoritarian leadership. There’s so many factors (ultra-nationalism, changing demographics, less foreign investments, capital flight, overhead of doing everything themselves) that is slowly eroding Chinas economy.
it also forces some redundancy into the mechanisms of running a technological world - a disaster that affects one of the two or three polities may well leave enough stuff working that civilisation doesn't need to collapse completely.
a world where everything depends on everything else working correctly is a bit more fragile than I would like.
I see this as likely in the same vein as Google copying the Java APIs. The similarity is important because of the compatibility it brings.
So there's very much still an incentive to care about what Android does, and what API interfaces it exposes (at least in the transitional period).
Whether that will still be true a decade or two from now is a different question.
Depending on the country that's going to be some mobile payment options, banking apps, social media or government ID. If even one of those are missing, people will pick another brand, something with the Play Store.
I just looked up WeChat and Douyin, for example, and they are working on HarmonyOS versions: [0].
0. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3267411/huaweis-h...
But I think it's a mistake to assume that the Play Store is equivalent to your developer footprint for a platform.
Google has been fairly insidious about integrating OS level APIs with the Play Store, so that's blurred the line a bit here - but if the OS is otherwise "Android-like" enough that it's just a matter of choosing a different target in your build and linking to different binaries... it'll be very easy to port over the developer base that's interested.
Seems like Harmony is doing exactly that, and already has a large swath of companies that are planning to support the OS - so while some of that is likely because of government influence in this case... it's not required (ex - I'm thinking of Google and the whole lawsuit with Oracle around the Java APIs)
Huawei had a 4% market share last year. Is that going to be enough for something like MobilePay in Scandinavia to ensure that they are present on a platform, from a company and country they don't entirely trust? Without the MobilePay app, the number of people who'd buy the phones drop to almost zero. The same happens if Danes can't use their government ID on the phones, sales drops to almost zero, because the device just lost a major feature.
I don't think it matters that Huawei has a large swath of companies ready to support their OS, it has to be all of them (or at least the right ones).
They might pull it off and get every one on board, but the investment has to be really small to justify the work for such a small user base.
Countries like Iran, Russia can be next target for obvious reasons.
In SEA likes of Grab and Gojek can be financially motivated to create apps. If they get a 4-10% marketshare it will make sense for Meta to port its apps to protect its position.
YouTube will be a blocker as Google has strong reason to not support any alternative platform even if it will make sense for the App. Same happened for Win Phone earlier.
I guess it makes sense, I was curious why they would want people to work on e.g. Servo since Firefox is already available on Android... now I know :) Their team there made a pretty good impression for the record, they were knowledgeable and pitched their projects quite well (several of them quite interesting).
Despite it being Huawei, I am interested to see how well the OS plans out.
HarmonyOS NEXT is probably a lot more existential for Huawei.
They could of just made it a new version of Android.
However it is quite clear by now, this is the best Fuschia will ever get, and it is mostly a top level software engineer retention program.
That's kind of big, HarmonyOS would not be just another Android flavor anymore.
> we're sorry to report that Huawei told us it currently has no plans to offer Harmony OS NEXT outside of China
That's to be expected. If you live outside of China and don't know Mandarin, the apps are not usable.
I think they're bared from US distribution and PlayStore being Google is a no-go.
But they're not banned in the EU nor SEA or anywhere outside the US really, and the open source part of android is also probably fair game.
It feels like refocusing on the Chinese market only is a business move more than a limitation of what they can do.
Perhaps Xiaomi is putting too much market pressure to make it viable to them ?
In my country, Spain, Huawei was the market leader with over 28% market share:
https://e00-expansion.uecdn.es/assets/multimedia/imagenes/20...
Since the ban, their market share suddenly plunged and is now 3%, and obviously the reason is lack of Google services.
I myself stopped buying Huawei phones despite thinking that they were far superior to other brands (Xiaomi is a joke compared to the reliability of Huawei products, my 2019 Huawei P30 Pro is still in active use by my wife and its battery lasts for more than a day after close to five years. She didn't want to "update" to a newer Pixel 6 Pro since the battery was much worse). But I don't have time to spend on periodically hacking the phone to get access to Google services when an update makes the previous hack stop working.
Not just that, China has super apps that integrate everything from payments, food delivery, taxi, social media... To single application. Integrating this app directly into OS as a launcher (or shell) kind of makes sense.
("third party" and "private" parts are relevant, IMO, otherwise Twitter superapp-ification had happened years ago)
My point is that 3td party apps do not make much sense in China. They are useless without support from super app
There are Chinese regional apk distribution sites for Chinese phones. You don't hear about those(I don't either) because there are near zero communication bandwidth across languages on this planet. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
I mean, you're simply describing an operating system. The west builds this as an operating system. China builds it as an app. The rise of the Chinese super-apps is literally just a response to the reality that the West, especially Apple, forces everyone they work with to think inside the App box. Uber has to build an app if they want to access Apple's customers; but with the Uber app adding delivery, its also becoming a little Super.
The more interesting question is why the west doesn't have super-apps similar to the east. The reality, which I hinted to, is that I think we're starting to see more of them; Uber has delivery, Spotify is adding audiobooks, Google is adding an AI assistant, I think the scope-creep of these apps should give you a clue as to why China built them first.
There's certainly cultural aesthetic differences; maybe the west places greater importance on simplicity and focus. I think the bigger reason is market dynamics. The west has a relatively far more competitive market among these goods and services providers. The primary fuel funding technology companies over the past twenty years has been venture capital, which is attracted to younger, newer companies over the old established players. But, venture capital is slowing down, the marketplace is calcifying a bit among the established players, both new ones from the VC boom and old ones which survived it: And now we're starting to see these players branch out from their core competency and become more-and-more super-appy as they pursue greater growth with less fear that a startup is going to drive-by and eat their lunch.
That and he just has a kooky fascination with the letter X.
But not that it matters in the end considering the chaos the US has where eventually everyone gets to see what we do on our cells to. It is just a matter of speed, China is probably just more efficient.
That is very interesting. And considering that Harmony OS is not based on Android and Linux, I would be curious to see it running on a PC.
I wonder if they really tried or if they just suck too much. I thought about getting invested into the eco-system. The technical details of NEXT are quite interesting; however, the on-boarding is literal garbage. I still, to this day, can't sign up for a Huawei ID and I am currently located in Asia.
Their hardware, firmware, and core parts of the software are nearly flawless, at least compared to Apple/Google in 2024, but the moment you need something beyond the shipped product it becomes a hoop jumping exercise. And the documentation is much worse.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's full of shortcuts with privilege escalations or contradicting exceptions.
Not because it's Huawei, but because it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in.
When it comes to meeting a production deadline of a product, the pressure to apply a quick workaround is much much higher than the pressure to follow a structured process from whatever platform-team.
Source: I worked in lots of companies which at some point tried to establish various kinds of frameworks, just to be forced to break them again in order to ship on-time...
That's what Apple has been doing for nearly 20 years now.
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If you expect that Huawei will:
delay a million-device mass-production for i.e. China Mobile because the project-team needs to wait for the platform-division to implement a fix in their common core and complete the entire release-process, for the project-team to then merge their code again on-top of this new release and start retesting the impact of all the other patches,
-> instead of:
the project-team just patching their fork of the platform, release a new build for China Mobile immediately and take a note to "deal with this later"
then you have not seen the reality of this industry yet.
Even Huawei's existing products are a multitude of forked and re-forked codebases with changes left and right, updated/outdated libraries and ever-pending merge-tasks. I don't expect this to suddenly change now
And who knows, maybe this is the seredepity point to end US monopoly on mobile OSes.
I like Linux, but porting a country's software on linux is no trivial task.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
Also maybe EU should start thinking in better supporting SuSE or something like that.
Currently it's full of rough edges and barely (if at all) works. But I do believe it's going to happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
[2] https://www.phytium.com.cn/homepage/production/15/ (Chinese-only)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_(processor)
[4] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/huawei-bring...
So even if 40-70% of corporate computers can be moved out it's still big.
Add security concerns... What happens if windows activation server goes down? Or Microsoft pushes some hostile patch?
Today, Linux with Wine can be the easiest way to run old windows software.
You can have the surveillance gulag of Google, or the surveillance gulag of the CCP. Pick your poison.
Google, on the other hand, can have a massive influence on my day to day life.
