Re: "radioactive to larger software houses"
They already have a huge customer base in China (as stated 0.5 billion) , where Google is banned. The question is whether Huawei's OS will make Huawei phones marketable outside of China. At one point I believed that Huawei's OS would be able to get a foothold in India, with cheap hardware carrying the OS to success. That might have been the leg up they needed. But then China's Himalayan troops surprise attacked Indian Himalayan troops with handheld spiked clubs killing 30 or so Indian soldiers.
China actually does provide about half the worlds manufactured goods. I don't, and nobody should, underestimate the real power and leverage that brings with it. But I don't see China edging out borkzilla with their own zilla, especially when the power of zilla's have already reached their zenith.
If Huawei really wanted to make a mark, they would market a cellphone hardware base with a stable long term generic OS interface so anydevelopers could develop their OS' on that hardware platform. Let 1000 OS' bloom. But they will never do that because 'open' is anathema to the CCP.