Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch Huawei formally launched its home-brewed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT, on Wednesday, marking its official separation from the Android ecosystem. Huawei declared it released and "officially started public beta testing" of the OS for some of its smartphones and tablets that run its own Kirin and Kunpeng chips. Unlike …
"Huawei also claimed that at the time of its announcement, over 15,000 HarmonyOS native applications and meta-services were also launched. That’s a nice number, but well short of the millions of apps found on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store."
15000 apps is not so bad for the beginning Of the Millions of apps on google/Apple it would be interesting to see how many are actually used and what kind of user base most of them have.
I am confident that China will indeed gain it's independence and them we will lose ours because we were all smug. Google and Apple are mastodons today but tomorrow has a bad habit of arriving quicker than we expected. I would be happy that Google/Apple/FB/MS lose some of their monopoly status but I am also a little wary of how that could be done and most notably by who...
This is not to defend all the crappy apps on Google Play, especially the ones that are basically just a browser wrapper around the website, but the (Mainland) Chinese app market is just as scammy, if not scammier. Just consider how many of the worst apps on GPlay/iOS Store are (Mainland) Chinese.
This will not help with that. It has nothing to do with improving the quality of apps, just removing the (Mainland) Chinese government (which Huawei is a bulwark of, by Mainland Chinese law) from any dependence on anything gwailo.
(And I keep explicitly using 'Mainland' because I have nothing against Chinese people, just Xi's fascists)
I would be happy that Google/Apple/FB/MS lose some of their monopoly status
They got that status by having proprietary technology - or encumbering open technology (like Android) with proprietary components without which it's seriously diminished in utility.
This situation isn't improved by adding further, incompatible, proprietary options. My bank is increasingly deprecating its online banking in favour of its mobile apps because it doesn't want to have to maintain a website as well as apps for two incompatible mobile platforms. It's not willingly going to increase its development and maintenance costs for yet another platform. A duopoly is where the intersection between proprietary technologies and the reasonable expenditure of developer resources leads,
Unless and until you can run the same app (or at least one that has substantially the same source code) on every phone (and even, perhaps, on the web) that's going to persist - and it's in the interests of the incumbents that day is as far away as possible. China has rather different reasons for treading a different path and can line up the various parts of the ecosystem along it as and when it chooses. Regulators elsewhere are belatedly waking up to the problem of platform gatekeepers, but they're (rightfully) not able to develop or impose technical solutions and it's hard to see at present from where those might emerge.
"My bank is increasingly deprecating its online banking in favour of its mobile apps because it doesn't want to have to maintain a website as well as apps for two incompatible mobile platforms."
The simple answer is to scrap the apps and only maintain the web site. Banking apps will never be installed on my phone - they're a scammers paradise and so easily stolen.
Any bank that requires an app will never get my custom.
Do you use Social Media Apps?
Do you use any browser originating with Google?
If you, your ID and all your details are probably already known to the scammers and they don't need to steal your phone.
I use an old and small iPhone SE mk 2. Not attractive to the street thieves as it has almost zero resale value. I also don't walk down the street wafting it around like so many people.
Most (if not all) banking apps require some biometric ID these days.
Finally,
What happens when this Gov of ours introduces the UK Government APP. IT will start with having to show it to get any treatment under the NHS and soon expand to all Gov departments.
Papers Citizen will be replaced by 'Show me your App, Citizen'.
Never say never.
Web pages have thousands of vectors of attack and scammers develop infrastructure to attack web pages. Can we trust banks to block every security flaw?
I hate Apps, but at least they can secure the login (usually as good as the phone provides) and attacking an App usually requires the phone to be compromised AND attackers would need to reverse engineer some of the App and attackers can be fingerprinted by the bank. iPhones and Pixels are both reasonably secure (certainly more secure than browsers on Windows).
I have a little experience trying to secure a web page and it is an impossible task because by-design the user controls their browser and users have lax security habits and there are multiple attack vectors (network MiTM, plugins, browsers, OS, ...).
While I agree with you in principle, we don't know how the bank app communicates with the bank. For all we know it is logging into the bank's website, but regardless it is logging into something with an internet presence that could be theoretically be attacked just like a website can.
When you first login with your bank app you need to give it your login/password you use on the website. Ideally once it is logged in it will create some sort of PKI keypair and use that for all future logins, as that is less vulnerable than a login/password. But there's no way to know.
One thing I noted when recently upgrading my iPhone is that while the automated copy of everything directly from my old phone to new one captured a lot of stuff, including wifi passwords that kept on the keychain (i.e. stored in the secure enclave) I had to re-authenticate with my bank app (and several other apps like my brokerage app, hospital patient portal app, symantec key generating app) and my understanding is that the reason is since it is a different phone the existing authentication to their servers is no longer valid. So whatever it is doing it isn't simply giving the login/password, because in that case it would make no difference I had a new phone.
Any bank that requires an app will never get my custom
They probably won't want it, any more than they want the custom of anyone who insists on cheque books or having staff in physical locations.
Digital technology has fundamentally changed the relationship between businesses and their customers - and not to the advantage of customers. Your choice, ultimately, will be to use an app or try to get other people to accept the cash from under your mattress. Which, increasingly, they will find themselves unable to spend.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, just that your assumption that banks will take any notice of you may have been valid in a previous century but is not the way things are shaping up in the present one.
-- Banking apps will never be installed on my phone --
Ditto
Having moved to broadband only (ie no landline) I had to let my bank know my mobile number (I used to deny having a mobile). Now rather than using the card reader and card to generate a passcode they send a code to my mobile. I wonder which is more secure - card reader kept in home office desk draw, card kept in card wallet in a different room plus my having to enter the pin for the card into the reader compared with - a OTP sent to my mobile.
Naturally they are very concerned about security and 2FA
That may be the size of the set of apps you use and the apps you imagine others using, but as usual, there's a lot of people with many use cases. A lot of those apps are useless inclusive or riddled with malware, but that doesn't make the remainder that small. We also have no information about what kind of apps you can use on the Harmony OS devices, because that count could be 15000 trustworthy and useful apps or 8 of those and 14992 automatic translations of a cheap game or utility, ad presenter, and spyware.
When existing phone platforms failed, it was often because they didn't have the kind of third-party software that the established ones did. This was often described in terms of the well-known services whose apps weren't available, and that was part of the problem, but so was the lack of or poor choices for everyday utilities that people had gotten used to wanting.
".. the company has covered 18 vertical domains to develop native apps. As a result, HarmonyOS NEXT apps can meet 99.9% of consumers’ usage time needs.
They adapted 470+ SDKs to HarmonyOS NEXT. This ultimately lessens the app development workload by 90%. *One-Time-Development App, working on every device, PC, TV, EV, Wearables etc.
.. allocating $851 million annually to attract developers & have an over 6.75 million registered developers on the HUAWEI Developer Programs."
HC
** History of development - 5 mil lines of code / v3.0 - 26 mil / v4.0 - 100 mil. (Win11 have approx 60 ÷ 80 mil)
Of course, you have to wonder whether the Chinese government will encourage this sort of thing, with the idea of stamping out Android in China? And once it's dead in China, spreading their home grown operating systems elsewhere. Can't buy Android phones if China won't make them.
Not for spying purposes, of course*, just for that sweet 30% cut of all the money spent on apps and subscriptions and so on... why let it flow back to Apple and Google?
* say this as sarcastically as possible
To be honest, I'd rather be spied on by China. At least Chinese Police can't turn up at my door and arrest me because I interacted online in what our blob decides is 'disinformation' or 'hate-speech'.
Not yet they can't , who knows what the future holds.
In any event your local police, if you are a left pondian island dweller, can do that at the moment so there is no easy escape whichever way you look at it.
China being a authoritarian state it may well be feasible for HuaweiOS to attain considerable market share in China. The China government will entice (read: throw their management in jail) companies to use the operating system on their systems.
This marks the start of a total decoupling technologically between the West and China. Most likely China will also pursue RISC-V processors instead of ARM or x86 to further that aim.
One news source is saying that it is a new OS and will even be Closed Source, which wouldn't have been possible if it inherited Android's open source license or contained any Linux code for the matter.
https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-next-is-a-closed-operating-system-just-like-ios-developer/
Do you think that a Chinese based company is concerned about if they are using GPL code in their closed source OS?
Even if Google or another western company tried to take them to court in China of breach of the GPL the Chinese courts would just find in favour of Huawei and probably tell Google to pay their court costs for wasting their time.
That article had a few very concerning flaws and was basically a hit job.
I posted in the comments under the article pointing some out, especially that HarmonyOS was multi kernel, and as such, was many things to many devices. Only phones and tablets had anything to do with Android. Watches, routers, TVs were running pure HarmonyOS.
Also, there were considerable changes made (with regards to Android) on phones and tablets. The entire networking stack was re-written for example to enable Huawei's ultra fast device connection capabilities and improve stability.
As an aside, some reports say connection speeds are even faster now on HarmonyOS NEXT with file transfer speeds up to twice as fast as iOS.
And to think that Just last year the Western Press was gloating over the death of Huawei
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US sanctions killed the old Huawei. What will the reborn one look like?
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The death of Huawei won't stop the rise of China
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Huawei’s Android and Windows alternatives are destined for failure
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Google may just have killed Huawei’s bid to become the world’s top smartphone brand
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