Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess Launching a new mobile OS is what professional historians of technology refer to as a dumb move. It is so shatteringly stupid that even Microsoft stopped bothering after three or four goes – did we all just imagine the Kin? Apple and Android have all the apps, all the hardware, all the market, and between them have wrung the …
Not just companies. Genious idea by our local council - want to park and go to the cinema? App!!
Don't worry though, it's still a prepay system, you just have to hand over all your data to a 3rd party app developer, agree to their terms, guess how long the film will be with delays/ads/trailers, and hope your not in a rush if it's your first time because there's no signal inside the multi-story carpark to download the app anyway.
All the negatives of an old school ticket sytem, with all the negatives of a 3rd party app. Amazing.
Let's not forget the no-holds-barred access to your credit card.
It's one of the key reasons why I simply do NOT deal with companies that reject a prepay card for subscriptions: the prepay ensures it has a manageable upper limit (aka 'how much I put in the pot') instead of that ever shifting line wit which the bank is trying to lure me into credit card debt, and it stops the even more dangerous idea of direct debit which is full of promises until someone screws up which, astonishingly, is never in your favour.
The only issue is Worldline which is now so hypersensitive to fraud that they block ANYTHING by default, even if it had been cleared with a 2FA variant like a QR code.
"idea of direct debit which is full of promises until someone screws up"
While my phone and taxes are on direct debit, I still blatantly refuse to set one up for paying for the electricity.
Why? Because they still take out entirely fictitious amounts of what they think your consumption might be. Most of the country is hooked to smart meters. They know exactly how much is used day by day. There is no justification for this crap and it's quite a surprise that they haven't been raked across the coals for it. A married couple living in the same town recently had to argue to stop them debiting nearly 500 euros. What the actual....?! Just take what the smart meter says was used, The. Freaking. End.
You do not want to go anywhere near anything still using a pilot light. That's the best part of a kilowatt of gas going straight out of the flue between cycles.
For comparison, a very badly-designed electronic ignition sequence control with a resistor/Zener dropper would waste 10 watts of electricity between cycles.
I pay actuals every month against my usage (factoring in earnings from solar) and won't deal with any company that doesn't support that. My bills are more in the winter and less in the summer. That's how I like it. Octopus are happy to do this though getting them to bill me on my chosen date (ie not the day before pay day) has been a struggle.
As you mentioned Euros I guess you are not in the UK.
In the UK in my experience (of my last 2 electricity suppliers) they will happily set up to take the bill amount rather than a fixed monthly amount designed to make it predictable (but which inevitably results in the account building up credit).
Will they not do this where you are? The disadvantage is you don't know the exact monthly amount. The advantage is you only pay the correct amount each month.
Err, just because a smart meter is installed does not mean it it working. In the UK allegedly 35 million have been fitted and 4 million are knackered.
Many have had one installed because they have solar panels of a home car charger and it is a requirement of the setup.
Equally it is still a piece of tech and just as likely to go wrong as any other bit of IT shite. I agree that the point of smart meters is to ensure readings and bills are accurate but as ever there is the notion that the technology is infallible.
I found the nerd wallet app helps me a lot because I was able to link my bank accounts and get a net worth then link my one credit card to see my actual worth. It's only a small step in understanding my finances. But I have to learn more about managing finances which r/personalfinance 's wiki is really informative about.
But nerdwallet doesn't support PayPal with a 2fa enabled with is a big nono. So I stopped using my PayPal credit card.
Using the app to pay for parking "was" useful. Then I looked at the sign last year where I park for taking the dog on the beach. Reasonable price but turns out they add 20-25p to the app price for "admin". So I pay cash all the time now, fuckers. The Parish Council has ignored my request to update the inaccurate sign so anyone that gets a fine now can have it thrown out until they update that.
It's like Netflix except there's no pause button, the sound is too loud, and they throw you out if you take your top off and loosen your knickers.
Joking aside, I do prefer watching movies at the cinema to at home. Trouble is that nearly all of them are sequels or remakes these days, which is not in the least bit interesting.
Part of it is that, unless you have a large enough number, you may not have a few good basic ones. If I could choose that, I could live with an app catalog that has about ten things in it as long as all of the things were well-maintained things that have all the features I rely on, but a lot of users have different wants. For instance, when I first got a smartphone, there were lots of navigation apps. Few of them let me do some of the things I needed a navigation app to do, such as work on an offline map because I didn't have much mobile data back then. If there had been very few apps, maybe I couldn't have found one at all or I could only have found one that was missing some other important feature to me.
If every app was designed the way I wanted and well-written and well-maintained, I could be fine with an app catalog of about ten apps. I know that, if it is a small catalog, chances are that I will find many missing features from whichever apps are actually available there.
> Part of it is that, unless you have a large enough number, you may not have a few good basic ones.
“A large enough number” is sector dependent. In all cases the challenge is generating sufficient revenue and/or investment to enhance a product and then maintain a business over some years, and thus be able to take account of feedback…
The gajillions of apps vary primarily in which of your personal data they Hoover off your phone, and which 3rd-party framework vendor/data reseller they exfiltrate that data to.
Beyond that, the app landscape is RemakeVille. Remakes of Lunar Lander, Hunt the Wumpus, Mille Bourne (correct spelling?), Star Trek, Hammurabi, Angry Birds, Tetris, chess, checkers, backgammon, Battleship, Blackjack, Poker, weather apps, gambling apps, Fantasy Football (American), Football (American Soccer), Basketball, Baseball, Candy Crush, calculators, photo takers/editors, stock trackers, porn viewers, password managers, QR code scanners, bar code scanners, form-fillers, etc.
The problem is when your few apps aren't on there. Odds are the apps I use and the apps you use are very different, and a small app store can only accommodate so many types of users. Sailfish happens to accommadate your few apps very well, but solong as they lack my work's authenticator app, the phone is worthless. And some other apps I like to use like for my bank and stuff. (Funnily games tend to be weirdly well supported on smaller app stores, no idea why.) And the 15k is even smaller than it sounds when you consider that there are often different versions of the same app (like if one is a "pro" version, or like how some apps have different versions in different regions, etc.)
The point about apps is, they lock the consumer into your walled garden -- and by implication, keep them out of your competitors' walled gardens.
The purpose of a McDeath's app is not to make it easier for you to order burgers from McDeath's; but to make it harder for you to order burgers from Murder King or anywhere else.
All they've ever needed to do to lock out western alternatives is ban iPhones. Google Play is blocked in China so you need a VPN to access Google services, something which they could crack down on any time they want. Chinese made Androids have long been Google free, so Huawei changing from a non-Google flavor of Android to something now claimed (I'm not sure if I've seen it confirmed) to be free of any Android or Linux code doesn't change things.
It does make things more difficult for customers in China, this is effectively a third platform. Having the major apps like WeChat is one thing, but what about apps for some minor city's rail system, or regional bank? Will China's government "encourage" porting to this or will they let it sink or swim on its own based on consumer demand?
I agree this is something that could only happen in China. They're used to a fragmented app market, with each major brand having its own app store and various alternative app stores. They are all 'Android' but since the Android versioning isn't the same between OEMs compatibility between brands isn't guaranteed.
Not necessarily a dumb move for the user, but for a company that wants to make money, historically it has been reliably unsuccessful. Windows Phone, Amazon Fire Phone, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, Tizen, each of these companies tried to have their own OS. Some of them were appreciated by the users. None of them are around today. That's not just bad for the companies. If you spent time learning the development environments for these things, or if you hired others to do it, you didn't benefit much from doing it. That, in turn, was bad for users. If you bought one of those because the default apps were all you needed, then you were probably fine until the phone itself broke. If you bought one of those expecting that there would be third-party functions that never arrived, less so.
I would like to see more mobile operating systems, but I understand why companies are unlikely to try making them, why developers will probably not write applications for them, and why they won't sell well. A successful one would indeed provide great benefits to the general consumer, but I'm not sure how we can get there and the consumers who try alternatives tend to have problems when their devices get dropped.
That's different, they were going up against the might of Google, and Apple's dominance of the high end. The only legit attempts IMHO were Windows Phone and Fire Phone, the rest were jokes that never had a chance of exceeding 1% of the market. Microsoft's mistake was trying to charge for licensing in a world where Android is free. By the time they went free licensing it was too late, Android was too well entrenched as the "non iPhone alternative" and there wasn't a compelling reason for a third entrant.
Fire's only selling point seemed to be "better integration with Amazon", which might be seen a bit better today when they have other products like Echo and Fire TV but back then it was just the phone. What was the value proposition of that phone versus running the app on an Android or iPhone? There wasn't one, hence its failure.
Perhaps they could have succeeded by subsidizing the phones (if the carriers weren't already doing that) so maybe they could have had a subsidy via paying people to use them in exchange for collecting data to use for in-app advertising. Google makes billions off Android from that, so Amazon could have afforded to give back some of that to its users and still made some profit - and done what Bezos probably really wanted Fire Phone to do and hurt Google.
Tizen was Samsung. They had plenty of money they could have put into it. Firefox OS got several manufacturers on board, not as many as Windows Phone had even in the days when it was asking for payments, but still several. Neither of those was doomed to failure either. So four out of five had an opportunity, yet all failed. Huawei's got some opportunity to go somewhere, but I'm not seeing a reason why their outcome would be so different. They have money, just like Microsoft had. They have themselves on board as a manufacturer and parts supplier, just like Samsung did. Some argue that they've got an interesting technical base, like Mozilla did. Since those things didn't help the rest of them, why would I expect this one to be different even if they do try outside of China. I'm still not convinced it will survive in the Chinese market where Android is a pretty common platform, but if patriotism gets it there, that's no reason why it would succeed elsewhere. Microsoft spent eight years and billions of dollars trying to crack into the market, in a time where the market was less developed and therefore they had a good chance, and that was still not enough.
"Getting several manufacturers on board" to put out one low end FirefoxOS phone meant it was doomed to failure. Tizen only had a chance if Samsung had preferred it over Android, but they knew that would devastate their phone sales as customers wanted Android because there were no Tizen apps. Samsung would have had to spend a LOT of money to bribe Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and other major apps to port to Tizen but it still would have failed.
If Samsung had been pushing Tizen as their Android alternative instead of wasting years with Windows Phone maybe it would have succeeded. By the time it came out, Android was way too entrenched. It too was doomed to failure.
If I were an app developer, I wouldn't wish for more than two ecosystems, if that. There is a reason PCs consolidated into three OS's (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and no more, with Linux dragging behind in terms of mainstream app support.
The best we can hope for is a couple of ecosystems which are open source and won't go away if a company goes away. Android comes close. HarmonyOS Next is not open source, and a disaster in many ways if it were to ever succeed globally.
I wouldn't wish for more than two ecosystems, if that. There is a reason PCs consolidated into three OS's (Windows, MacOS, Linux)
according to you, the reason there are 3 main general OSs on the desktop is that 2 ecosystems is the maximum viable ? Mathematics aren't your strength I take it.
Did they say "maximum" anywhere? I don't see that in their comment. If you're going to accuse them of mathematical error, making a reading error won't help.
I'm not sure I agree with them, but their point was that too many operating systems will make things harder for developers and this will cause some platforms to die, they suggested that desktop operating systems only have two leading ones with Linux behind on software support, and their proposed solution would involve four mobile operating systems: IOS, Android, and a couple open source ones of unspecified origin. In my opinion, the market could sustain more players through more cross-platform development, but I'm not sure how to get from our duopoly to that point. Your rebuttal misstates their point and attacks only the bit you made up.
Thanks for the support, but I want to add that I wasn't proposing any solutions, I was merely being realistic. And so I don't think four platforms are ever likely on mobile. I was simply saying that ideally both the platforms should be open source if there are only two, and beyond any particular company's ability to monopolize or run into the ground.
Cross-platform development is great in theory, but it still takes resources. Also such a thing is an unstable equilibrium -- one platform deciding to introduce an incompatible proprietary type of apps ("high performance native apps!!!") would skew app numbers in favor of that platform by supporting both types of apps, so every platform will want to do that.
p. s. I'm not a committee. I'd much rather be misgendered than be referred to as "they", but my pronouns are my master/my master.
The best for the consumer would be an open standard for apps. Any app written to that standard could work on any phone from any manufacturer. Any phone built to that standard could run any app.
Apple is clearly not open. Only Apple can make phones that run iOS apps.
Android is part way there. There are apps and phones from multiple manufacturers. The issue of the central app store is being addressed. The big remaining issue is that Google forces their apps on Android phones, and also deliberately designs Android to not work without their apps. (E.g. location services).
Will this open standard specify some sort of byte code, or will it only specify the APIs that the app is allowed to use?
Then you will need to prohibit all other kinds of apps on phones, because otherwise a platform which also allows proprietary app standards might gain an advantage. Such a prohibition might then be interpreted as stifling innovation, etc.
I think one of the key factors here is the use of 'mobile services' from gatekeepers hooking into apps to make them unusable on other platforms.
One solution could be requiring gatekeepers to get their tentacles out of apps.
Another would be for them to provide services support on other platforms. In essence to make a solution like GBox but certified and supplied by Google.
I can already run Huawei Mobile Services on my Android phone for some Huawei functionality (including Huawei ID and making my phone a trusted device). The problem is that it isn't full support.
In gatekeeper terms, this is a huge barrier to platform hopping.
Imagine a world where an iPhone user could pick up a Samsung phone and have an Apple supported 'Apple Mobile Services' platform run on it through an Apple ID and access to Apple services.
Currently GMS is banned from Huawei devices which is a purely unilateral political move.
Legislation - requiring - availability would leave Google with two options: pull out of a market or breach sanctions. In such a case a licence would quickly be issued for Google to certify use on Huawei phones.
From then on, users would be able to choose their preferred platforms (hardware and software) and mix and match as needed.
I'm running a Mate 60 Pro using Harmony 4.2 and it's a great phone for day to day use.
The ony visible downsides are I cannot use Google wallet and AndroidAuto - the latter is not a deal breaker for me, and the former just means I still pay with cards.
The rest of my apps are installed via MicroG services, which enables most playstore apps.
It would obviously be a whole different ballgames moving away from android entirely. I think at that point that phone would become a brick in non-China markets.
The writer seems to think that success can only be measured in global terms. If the Chinese market for Apple and Android shrinks to small numbers, I wonder if either will find it worthwhile trying to compete, especially if there are specific requirements (especially regarding hardware). It's not inconceivable that India will see the benefit of a homegrown system, nor Russia. If China can break free of American market dominance, others may follow. The EU is starting to have influence over standards but is probably too tied into the USA to go it alone - it's part of the "western" world.
But I'm digressing from my original point that success does not have to be global to be success. As an example, the local coffee shop in my village is not a success by that view, despite it being busy, employs several local people and makes a big contribution to the local community life.
@AC : good points
the local coffee shop in my village ...
but they're not as successful as Starbucks, therefore they'll fail, that's the main argument of this article. I remember when I first started using Linux in the late-90, when Windows95 and 2000 where all the rage, and people asked me why I bothered with such a useless niche OS without relevant apps.
As for me, an open-source, US-free, real-time, secure, micro-kernel OS with userspace drivers , Posix-compliant, and I'll take it. QNX fits the bill but it's not open-source.
China has a population of 1.5B, India ~1.5B. China has a big, and growing, presence in Africa.There are good reasons Xi was talking to Modi last week.
If the USA (&EU) are going down the isolation route (say, with astronomical import tariffs), China will be forced to set up their own markets. It is well known that India and ASEAN (SE Asia) countries are unhappy with Apple and other US tech giants and might be receptive to proposals to diversify their dependencies.
Forcing your enemy to get to parity on tech is a very bad strategy, especially if that enemy has a bigger population, very good universities, and access to raw materials.
What could have brought US politicians to go that very dangerous route?
(/rhetorical question)
Spot on. The article's author says "And true sustainable parity will depend on access to the global markets with competitive cutting-edge products. There's no sign of that." and showing he's missing this point entirely.
India + Russia + China + chunks of SE Asia, Africa and South America is a global market. And saying there's no sign of "competitive cutting-edge products" is myopic. There are all the signs, just not for next month, not next fiscal term, maybe not for a few years - but, guess what, there's life beyond the next few years, and that life looks a lot like Chinese silicon reaching the cutting-edge.
As for why US politicians went down this route - I'd say ignorance (history shows pretty clearly how this sort of thing works), short-termism (look tough now, it'll be someone else's problem later), but there's a lot of racism in there. I read "China can never reach parity with Intel/AMD" and I don't know how else to interpret it. Of course they can, they just needed a strong motivation, and we just gave it to them.
As far as US politicians are concerned (well, those with visions of grandeur) there isn't much of importance outside the USA. The rest of the world appears to be seen as a useful market to sell into, gaining access to resources and potential influence (primarily the oil that the USA needs to supplement its own production, that can't meet the need its internal market has created). If something doesn't support the expansion of USA business and jobs, it's not relevant.
China doesn't export oil (well, nothing globally significant) so it's not important to the USA. That won't last, of course, as China gains more influence over the supply of other necessary resources to support the USA's internal demands. However, considering the age of most of the influential politicians in the USA, future needs are probably short-term, and it won't be their problem.
Me, a cynic???
India and China are oil and water. China's immediate neighbors in SE Asia are also extremely wary of China. Russia is collaborating with China reluctantly because they have no other options, and they can't be happy that China is ten times their economy, what with Putin's dreams of a new Russki Mir resurgence. Can't help comparing their alliance to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, with China likely coveting some of the land that Russia took from them in their "Century of Humiliation". They recently renamed some Russian-held cities back to their Chinese names in official usage. Also a map was issued with a tiny Russian held island included in China.
But I have no doubt that countries more distant from China can be persuaded to join its axis.
China and Russia share a long border, that's their mutual interest. Both countries have existed for a long time and so that border has been in roughly the same place through most of what we'd call in the West history.
I know that our media continually refer to Putin and Xi as 'dictators' but they're not, both countries have relatively democratic systems of government that do differ from our own but that doesn't make them fascist. Also, if you know anything about the background to the 1939 non-aggression pact negotiated by Ribbentrop and Molotov you'd know that the USSR had worked tirelessly to warn the European democracies about the dangers of Fascism during the 1930s but were systematically rebuffed. Since they (the USSR) were the stated target of Hitler's "Libenstraum" policies they felt justified to conclude whatever pact they thought necessary to survive (etc. etc. -- just read the history......). China had its own issues at the time, being in the process of being carved up by various empires, the big one being Japan (again, read the history....).
You are seriously shortening history. In 1500 AD, at the beginning of the colonial era, Russia was just a small country in Europe. Modern Russia is Russia's empire sanctified as a country. They never de-colonized thanks to the USSR acting as a bridge to modern times. China is jealous that Russia holds vast lands which could've been in their empire instead.
Russia has a nominally democratic system where if you are a critic of Putin, you will fall from a window or drink Polonium tea. The most recent being a prominent ballet dancer the other day. Russian businessmen have fallen from windows even here in India during this war. Meanwhile China has a one-party system like all dictatorships.
The USSR and Nazi Germany negotiated which countries they would divide up between them and started the world war together. There were negotiations for the USSR to formally join the Axis alliance. The USSR also sold the massive war materials needed for Germany to conquer Western Europe as part of their trade agreements during the war. During the Winter War when the USSR invaded Finland (agreed as being in USSR's sphere in the M-R Pact), the Allies were close to declaring war on the USSR.
Agreed what you said about China. Which is why China is jealous, because their "century of humiliation" prevented them from expanding.
Right, India's going to be China's expansion market. It's not like India's been more aggressive at banning Chinese apps, not operating systems, but just apps, than almost anyone else including everyone in the west. The US wants to ban TikTok? India already has, and unlike in the US, that ban has already gone into practice and been upheld by courts. It wasn't the only one. I'm sure they'd be eager to adopt a proprietary Chinese OS on all their devices.
You can buy a Harmony OS Next phone in any country you want. I'm not sure if Huawei is bothering to sell there, but you can easily find someone who will buy one in China and ship it to you. It's legal everywhere. It won't be popular, not because there's any restriction on it, but because it won't be very good in other markets. Huawei can try to improve that and pick some extra markets. They could put lots of money into that and succeed, but they could also put lots of money into it like Microsoft did to Windows Phone and fail anyway.
>> "There are good reasons Xi was talking to Modi last week."
Yes, like negotiating a withdrawal of troops from the border on both sides up in the Himalayas, something that has been draining resources for both sides for a few years now, after the cross-border fighting that killed an unknown (!) number of Indian and Chinese soldiers in 2020-21.
As an Indian, we don't see China as allies in any sense. They want to steal our land, and they want to flood our markets with their products. The US keeps talking about banning TikTok, we have already banned TikTok long ago. BRICS is not an alliance. "The Quad" stands more of a chance at becoming an alliance.
Exactly, those of us in the West aren't their target customers. I still use my old Huawei phone, bought before restrictions and the clamp down on the Google app store. It has a really good camera and I'll continue using the phone until it eventually dies, it has already had one new battery which only cost £30 fitted locally. Won't be buying another Chinese phone though, I don't like the sabre rattling around Taiwan etc.
I remember that situation happening in the early computing days, we had a big change when everyone had started using MSDOS - seen as a "big" change because the early PC's were smaller than the IMSAI 8080 running CP/M on 8 inch floppy disks ... then another change after Windows 1.0 updated so much and moved to NT but now platform "updates" every few years.
So many changes in our world, will AI be updated to BI (Bigger Intelligence) in a year or two - that's not a joke, it's just the world we've created.
In my Dutch experience, it was a government foreign to me that placed Huawei on a list that forbade Google to license Android on Huawei's upcoming devices. Not Huawei deliberately venturing into its own operating system and app store. It rendered my two great Huawei tablets rather useless, rather than have me enjoy them with higher-end apps from the Play Store.
Ironically, those who were mates with the US were the very ones pointing out that what the US said was not backed up by evidence (yes, now new. Think WMD etc.).
GCHQ gave the Huawei code a thumbs up, and these boys know what they're looking at. Weirdly, nobody asked US devices to go through the same checks.
Europe should..
GCHQ gave the Huawei code a thumbs up
Not quite, they said no backdoors but piss-poor coding standards. Flip side is they didn't get to look at the competition, and judging by the high score CVE for Cisco, Fortinet, Sonic, etc, they are probably as piss-poor as well.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/huawei_uk_security_code_review_panel/
Given the Chinese consumer has a social score to maintain, they're likely to keep those ideas private and use the phone that The Man recommends. There's also something of an element of patriotism here too, as it's a big Screw You! to the West.
Social credit score in China is fake news. Also, the people talking about how the Chinese government is suffocating their people do not know, or get, the Chinese culture. On average, the Chinese *love* their government. There are both material reasons (remember, back in the '90s, all those videos showing Chinese streets absolutely packed with people on bicycles? Now China has a car problem, because the roads are absolutely congested with them) and cultural reasons (Chinese, and in general Far East Asian culture, attributes more importance to the collective than to the individual). You'll find that there are similar issues of what we would consider overbearing control in Korea or Japan, the only difference is that instead of the government, it's their keiretsu/chaebol.
(1) Triumph, Norton, BSA etc...all poo-pooed the success of small Japanese motorcycles.
(2) That's all right they said....we still have control of the market for "big bikes". We'll leave the market for small bikes to others (i.e. the Japanese).
(3) Then one day the Honda 750 and the Kawasaki Z1 arrived....cheaper, faster....and no oil leaks!!
(4) The British motorcycle industry DISAPPEARED overnight!!
Maybe this Huawei story will turn out to be similarly deja vu?????
> 3) Then one day the Honda 750 and the Kawasaki Z1 arrived....cheaper, faster....and no oil leaks!!
Forgetting the Yamaha XS650 1972->
It had all of the above plus an electric start and handling, not surprising it became a bike girls liked riding….
Remember the British motorbike industry thought a girl’s place was riding pillion…
This kind of articles is a must, Mate 70 is on a production line.
"Such chutzpah must derive from something special under the hood, right?"
Well, Secret Magic is a Hyper-Threading (SMT) in the Kirin SoC. That Magic made a one node gap less, it brings approx 25% overall performance. To achieve that, it must be included in the OS engine and the app. Therefore, main tech benefit are from a native app's. So, it seems, 7nm equal a bad yield 3nm is a maybe achievable from OS NEXT.
HT in working:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/RZpd9EI9OE8
An Immersive achievements are birth of this kind of articles, & indeed so.
7nm vs 4nm *no HT
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/oTrz0jdd-4c
First half was a little off point on the facts and what lies behind them.
The US, seeing Huawei (and China) about to overtake it on technology (especially 5G and its industrial ramifications) set its sights on choking China and destroying Huawei. Both 'choke' and 'destroy' were the words used.
Huawei suddenly found itself having to react to seemingly insurmountable problems across the board.
Like Gromit on that train, laying the tracks in front of him at lightning speed to avoid it derailing.
They have pulled off the impossible. In five very short years they have done what it took Apple and Google took fifteen to achieve and gone beyond even that.
They wrote their own ERP system, MetaERP. That alone was a gargantuan undertaking. And even 'gargantuan' is an understatement.
They de-Americanized over 14,000 components and set about getting HarmonyOS and EulerOS into the hands of consumers and industry players.
They entered the automobile sector and have done the impossible there too. The GOD network putting them on the map with their self-driving goals.
They have pumped up their cloud business and not lost sight of their ICT infrastructure business either.
In 2018 they announced their AI plans and although they took the biggest hit in terms of advancement, new products are coming to market.
They have just opened a gigantic R&D Centre for semiconductor research and are still one of the world's top patent filers.
HarmonyOS specifically, is more than what has gone before. You only have to sit through the three hour HDC keynote to see where they want to go with it. Pay special attention to the references to siloes because it seems that companies like Apple are implementing ideas from HarmonyOS at each WWDC. The question is whether they are punching holes in those siloes (kludging it) or reworking the foundation of iOS. HarmonyOS was designed to be distributed. iOS was not. Apple has begun implementing years old Huawei features in recent years.
Apple cannot touch Huawei in terms of ecosystem. HomeKit was going nowhere and needed Thread/Matter to even remain relevant.
Now, cars play a part in that ecosystem with car to home TV video conferencing as well as car to car video conferencing.
Nearlink is a reality along with devices starting to support it.
All in five years. I would never bet against them because they simply have no option but to continue. They have to make it work.
The work on applied research and every single aspect of chip manufacturing will move as fast as it can. There are unknowns here but, like I said, I wouldn't rule out progress. Huawei has a habit of throwing thousands of scientists at hard problems and often gets results (polar codes for example). This time it isn't just Huawei and its investments in other companies. It is hundreds of universities and startups looking to solve the same problems.
ASML is now speaking its mind and pushing the Dutch government to cater to its own needs. Top Korean politicians have made similar comments.
With BRICS+ and Africa and South America there and open for business along with Asia itself I say things even look positive.
The US chose to weaponise technology. You only get to do that once and that ship sailed five years ago.
Bankrolled? You mean like the Chips Act in the US?
No. Huawei does get some subsidies. It does get some loans. It does get stimulus packages.
They even produced a video a couple of years ago debunking a lot of the 'government support' claims.
Basically, it works like any other business in any other country. The US included.
What has happened in terms of 'government support' of late is that the major carriers have opted for Huawei ICT gear in detriment to foreign gear. Hardly surprising given what has happened with some governments around the world.
In any event, that help amounts to money - not knowhow.
What Huawei has pulled off (in record time) is effectively the impossible. It has weathered a government onslaught designed to destroy it. It has doubled down on R&D. It has successfully moved into new business areas. It has gained in self sufficiency. It has de-Americanised thousands of boards and components. In its own words it is 'business as usual' (albeit a new 'usual').
The US and actually any other country that matters and is in their right mind do support their most vitally important companies as well. Nothing to be ashamed of. What matters is the end result. And it looks like the game of "choking" the competitor by way of sanctions and tariffs might end up serving just the opposite side in the end.
Absolutely, and this is already underway. Huawei alone was pumping 11 billion US dollars, annually, into US semi conductor interests. At the same time it wasn't developing its own solutions.
Those revenues from Huawei were part of the pie that was feeding future R&D projects. That has now gone (over 50 billion dollars so far) and as if that weren't enough, now Huawei (and the rest of China) is pumping money into replicating currently US dominated areas (and having success).
The upshot is lost revenues and seeing new competitors spew out of China to take even more revenues away. Also the need to plough government funds into chip production (something the US criticised China for for years in spite of being a completely normal process).
Having weaponised technology, no sane person would run solely with US options if alternatives exist. That day will (has) come thanks to US policy.
Openly saying they want to destroy a company opens up a can of worms of a different nature but those words mostly come from bumbling old senators or hawks blinded by their hate of China.
And if they don't exist, some will try to create them, which is precisely why the EU processor initiative was born. To give just one example.
A lot of pieces to the puzzle remain but they are all on their way. HarmonyOS NEXT (and EulerOS) are just two, and will be developed at lightning speed by modern standards simply because the US forced them to go it alone.
That darker, edgier AI-generated reboot of 'Metal Mickey' just doesn't have the charm of the original...
Also, what's up with his left arm?
Let's face it, routine manually made artwork for periodicals is going the way of the dodo. Nobody was ever stopping to admire the delicate curves and thinking about the human story behind it anyway.
Writing is a different matter, I do care that the text was written by a human.
The CCP knows the value of self sufficiency during conflict. New OS is a no brainer.
Personally, I wish a standard interface and dual booting ability were required for new cellphones marketed in the US so that existing OS could be applied immeadiately to most new phones.
So what's wrong with 7nm? My ~four year old(new?) Motorola is 7nm, and working beautifully (and my much older Huawei P10lite is also working fine, but the battery is holding less than 8 hours).
I don't know anybody who NEEDS the newest 3nm, 32GB/1TB (or whatever current specs might be) device. A few people I know WANT that, but only because they want to brag about it... they still use those devices mostly for making simple phone calls (not even video calls and god forbid any kind of messaging).
This "arms race" with performance has become stupid long time ago.
> This "arms race" with performance has become stupid long time ago.
The US didn’t learn the lessons from Russia. The US thought they
Had one over the Russians by only selling them low performance kit. Down came the wall etc. and what did we discover? the Russians had thrown intellect at the problem and developed algorithms that were much more efficient than the big number crunching approaches the west had adopted.
Nah, that time the US actually succeeded, and succeeded because the US was cold-warring commies and communism simply does not work. It just creates a slow decline into total and complete corruption, production shortages, and technological stagnation. I lived through the tail end of socialism in India, and I don't recommend it.
But this time the US is up against good old-fashioned fascism. The Austrian painter and co. proved that it can work economy-wise.
Because the apps become more bloated and resource hungry every year. I had to upgrade my 4 year old phone because beyond the Google suite there was only space left for about 20 apps. The Revolut app was already struggling and there was no space left for updates.
If the Chinese can build a smartphone with the usual goodies using only domestically made chips, even if it is two generations behind the latest Western tech, it means they have no trouble building modern missiles and drones with similar electronics. The latest process is not required for them, the one from 10 years ago is good enough.
Huawei can't fit any more malware into android, so they build their own OS
They realized android would warn users that their mic/cameras were ON and recording.....
So a new CCP - designed OS which is hardcoded to send EVERYTHING to Bejing. Documents, messages, audio. With microphone and camera permanently (and quietly) enabled 24/7 to spy on anyone it can.
Best part is pre-encryption it records keystrokes/passwords etc for banking apps, so Huawei can do whatever the f--- it likes with YOUR money.
They could've stuck with Android, given that it is open source and no one can stop them from forking it. And that's what they already did with the original HarmonyOS, which was a fork of Android.
This new kernel makes it closed source so they don't have to reveal what backdoors they put in or what they send back. The bootloader cannot be unlocked so no one is escaping from their clutches.
I see HarmonyOS as a sign that China is preparing itself to decouple (or be decoupled) from the West and have an independent technological base on which to keep innovating. They know that Chinese products and services will eventually become unpalatable in the West.
Their home market being big enough to support alternative creations they're building their own operating systems, software office suites, cloud implementations and semiconductor manufacturing industry to keep moving forward.
I seriously wonder if all this will matter if they lose access to Western markets. Their trade surplus will implode and their technology base will soon become outdated.
Quite a western based view, unsurprisingly.
That fear about running a Chinese phone with Chinese OS - ever considered their view? A Chinese resident running a US phone with a US OS? America already showed that they will block Chinese hardware for political and 'security' reasons. Could you trust that phone to keep your privacy or just keep working?
Everything that we're told in the West about Chinese spyware is exactly reversed in the East about Western spyware - and not unfairly.
That the Mate 60 sold so well is partly because of the American sanctions against Huawei
Except Huawei is going beyond that. The original HarmonyOS was a fork of AOSP Android, and with their own app stores, they already had nothing to fear. But no, they are building a new, proprietary OS with opaque code, and locking the phone bootloaders down to prevent swapping to another OS. Mighty suspicious to me.
There are other countries who might be interested in using HarmonyOS. The West and China are not the whole world. I'm thinking of BRICS. India, Brazil, Indonesia are all large markets. Some of them would like to disconnect from Apple/Google if they could control their own markets.
China could easily produce a FOSS version of HarmonyOS to achieve this.
As an Indian, why the heck would we actively seek out an OS controlled by our archenemies in China? We're busy banning Chinese apps (no TikTok here) and deciding when to deescalate the deadly border conflict with China.
China is seen through rose-tinted glasses by many Westerners, but not by the neighbors of China, on whom China has designs by virtue of "historical borders", a euphemism used by former empires who want to recapture those empires.
China making HarmonyOS Next FOSS is highly unlikely, or they would've already done that to attract support.
> China is seen through rose-tinted glasses by many Westerners
You think? I never got the impression that China- and, more specifically, the Chinese state under the control of the CCP- was generally viewed with favour by Westerners in the first place. If anything, it's the opposite.
Ignoring that nonsensically quasi-logical rationalisation...
Most people would read "China is seen through rose-tinted glasses by many Westerners" as implying that this is a view held by a notable percentage of Westerners at the very least. Not necessarily even a majority, but a significant minority or more.
If you think that anything more than a very small, non-representative percentage of Westerners view the Chinese state particularly favourably, then you're mistaken.
If you want to make a more legitimate criticism towards the OP, it would be that too many Westerners *do* buy into the BRICS hype and treat it as a homogenous bloc. They forget that it was originally just a convenient *economic* classification for lumping together the largest and most important "emerging" economies which ignored the fact that- even in its original form- the countries involved were otherwise different in many respects.
Something which remains true today, where, as you note, India and China are very different countries in many respects, with as many rivalries and disputes as common interests who (e.g.) remain in low-level but active conflict with each other over border regions.
What I mostly mean is that it is trendy in the West to hate the West (postmodernism, wokeism) and engage in cultural relativism, and if the West is totally evil, liberal democracy is a farce, and you still live there, maybe China is not so bad, despite being misunderstood and maligned by "racists"?
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were both westerners. CCP employs a failed western model with minor adjustments.
The whole thing today is about free people selecting their governments and being the fair and open jury of the government's performance vs juntas ruling over the people where the junta functions as its own jury.
I take issue with
"Until 2019, it was a Google partner running full Android. Then it forked its own version of Android, called it HarmonyOS, stopped including Google proprietary apps, and set up its own Android app store."
It should read it forked because it was forced to stop using Google, if it wasn't for the erm USA it would still be using Google. The way it reads it almost sounds like they wanted too, which it certainly did not
The best phone I ever had, pre smart phones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7110
I know I'm a dinosaur, but I use my phone to make calls!
Revolutionary I know, but I don't see the excitement about having your device track your every move and report it to the manufacturer's HQ, and others, for the purposes of making more money out of you.
I'd have another Nokia 7110 any time.
"I'd have another Nokia 7110 any time."
Here you go. I'd put money on you not actually buying it though. I bet you've been sucked in like the rest of us.
It's a similar story to that shitty "new" version of the Nokia 3310 they released a few years ago. Do you still see people using those? Did you *ever* see anyone using them as their regular phone after they'd shown them to their friends?
Of course not. I bet almost all are now gathering dust at the back of a drawer, having been thrown there as soon as the novelty had worn off.... because no-one *actually* wanted to go back to using a 3310.
That phone was never meant as a serious reproduction of *nor* a replacement for the original 3310. It was a cheap cash-in designed to pander to people's rose-tinted nostalgia for that period of their lives, to give lazy, piggybacking simiarly-nostalgia-pandering journalists an excuse to look back and navel-gaze.
And that's why people bought them- not because they ever wanted the reality of a revived 3310 nor were ever going to ditch their smartphone and go back to it. But because they wanted a cheap nostalgia fix.
(Anyone who wanted the reality of a feature phone in the late-2010s could already have bought one- the "new" 3310 was little more than one of those in a custom case anyway, and didn't even bother trying to accurately mimic the actual appearance or interface of the original 3310. )
> I know I'm a dinosaur, but I use my phone to make calls!
That's a legitimate preference, but it does fall into the trap of assuming that the traditional "phone" part of a modern smartphone is- or is *meant* to be- as central to its functionality as you assume. It's not, it's essentially a pocket computer/communications device/PDA that includes a phone amongst other features.
Really, "smartphone" today- and in the context of almost any "smartphone" from the iPhone onwards- is a misnomer that only reflects the direction it evolved from.
If anything, it would be more accurate and less misleading to view it as a more advanced successor to the 90s/early-2000s PDA that happens to include a phone, but by the time the iPhone came out, the PDA market was in rapid decline. Ironically, that's most likely in part because mobile phones themselves were including increasing amounts of secondary PDA-style functionality and other communications features by then.
"I know I'm a dinosaur, but I use my phone to make calls!"
I do wonder what people who don't want smartphones think smartphones do when you call someone. I have a smartphone because I want one, and I also make calls. The phone icon is right there on the main screen. I tap on it, dial a number, and talk. It works just fine. It has worked just fine on all the smartphones I've ever had. When did some idea come along that smartphone users must not use them for calls?
If you want a phone with fewer features, there are several around. You can avoid a touchscreen and get something that can do calls and SMS. They'll generally have a few other features, not always well-implemented ones, but if you just want to call, then you won't notice how badly implemented, for example, the tiny browser is because you won't use it. Some of them reportedly actually do that well enough too. So when reading your comment, it seems to imply two assumptions, that smartphones have some problem with calls and that non-smartphones are unobtainable, neither of which is true.
My kids all of them age range teens to adults..... They simply cannot understand why you'd want to speak and hear each other!
I'd like a Phone OS that's less invasive with it's telemetry and advertising etc etc.
I don't have an issue with my smartphone per se, but I did like the period when every phone manufacturer would produce funky designs and try and grab one's attention that way!
A more simple time for sure!
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Any new mobile OS is welcome, adding much needed competition to the duopolists.
The article is overwhelmingly negative.
The west, for reasons that were never proven, launched an extensive warfare against China.
All it got for it is the acceleration of China's own tech. The catchup is a matter of years, not decades.
Just look at EVs. Chinese EVs are objectively way better than anything from Europe or North America.
Who is the jury of the current China junta's performance? The people of China? The people of Tibet? The people of Sichuan? The people of East Mongolia? Or is the junta its own jury expressed merely by junta paid media & posters?
Would the current junta allow, say, the people Sichuan to "do a Taiwan" if the people of Sichuan so wish?
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