The article doesn't mention but it seems pretty relevant, Google kicked them from having the Play store etc on their phones a little while back as a result of political pressure so there's really no reason for them to care about Android any more.
The article explicitly cites it in the second last paragraph. It was a bit more than political pressure, though: Huawei was added to the entity list and it would be a crime for US companies or citizens to do business with them.
Usage of their equipment is one thing, technology export to a blacklisted company is another.
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.
It's a pretty big operation to purge all of that legacy gear, so the government made a multi-billion dollar fund to support the removal over time, and I believe gave them until 2025 to finish the purge. And even that isn't exhaustive: They can still operate it after the deadline, they'll just be restricted from various government subsidies and programs.
So the government didn't flip a switch and tell them to make it disappear. They expected it to be a staggered, eventual process.
Huawei is very present at EuroRust and seem to look for a lot of people to hire.
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).
I find it interesting how Huawei was able to make a nearly brand new microkernel operating system in a short amount of time, meanwhile Google with Fuchsia...
Despite it being Huawei, I am interested to see how well the OS plans out.
> If you live outside of China and don't know Mandarin
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.
Sounds nice at first until you look to see what places these apps are also linked too in mainland China.
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.
> Huawei did try to export the last version of the OS – and even offered assistance to developers who coded for the platform and targeted offshore markets – without success.
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.
Huawei or other Chinese companies are not particularly good at developer support. Maybe it's cultural or large corp or both. I have heard some bad stories about Ali cloud too. They are usable, but not particularly easy to use.
You can really see Huawei’s roots as a telecom vendor here.
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.
Indeed. I don't have much technical expertise in the kernel/OS space, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. On the other hand, their dev experience is akin to opening a router paper manual. There is an opportunity here but I am not sure how it can be unlocked.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux.
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...
I think it is good that we have a non-Google, non-Apple OS for mobile phones out there though I am guessing that the surveillance state will be in full operation in Harmony OS as well.
>Huawei hopes to bring its OS to PCs, too. Last month the chair of the Chinese giant's consumer business group, Yu Chengdong, revealed it would no longer run Windows on its future machines, but Harmony OS instead
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 the cost to Microsoft if there is a rigorous political effort by the CCP to move all Chinese desktop consumption away from Windows and Office Suite to open source (local) alternatives.
His friends at Tencent might have the desire and capability to do so.
If I were a CCP official I'd even relax some video game regulations when played on HarmonyOS to increase adoption. Under the guise of it having more 'safety' features or something like that.
I'd say that if you were worried before that on Chinese phones running Android there is something malicious but having some open source variant somewhere was protecting you somehow... you weren't paying much attention in this space for last decade+
If you live in the west and criticise your government, nothing happens.
If you live in China and criticise your government, even in private, you can go missing or end up in a camp
This is very over simplified and glossing over a huge amount of political repression that happens in the west just because it's more sophisticated. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're free because you're not in China. You would realize this the second you go against any powerful interests
The article doesn't mention but it seems pretty relevant, Google kicked them from having the Play store etc on their phones a little while back as a result of political pressure so there's really no reason for them to care about Android any more.
The article explicitly cites it in the second last paragraph. It was a bit more than political pressure, though: Huawei was added to the entity list and it would be a crime for US companies or citizens to do business with them.
That’s clearly not the case though?
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.
Usage of their equipment is one thing, technology export to a blacklisted company is another.
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.
They’re not supposed to be running it!
There were specific orders to remove Huawei from the telecom network (but yeah they were not followed) in 2019.
It's a pretty big operation to purge all of that legacy gear, so the government made a multi-billion dollar fund to support the removal over time, and I believe gave them until 2025 to finish the purge. And even that isn't exhaustive: They can still operate it after the deadline, they'll just be restricted from various government subsidies and programs.
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 guess it is a crime from the date they were added to the list, but not a crime to keep using devices purchased earlier.
I own a Huawei tablet and yes there is no Play Store. The Huawei app store also will link you to several third party sketchy apk stores.
Notably, this is a microkernel, multiserver operating system[0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT
Huawei is very present at EuroRust and seem to look for a lot of people to hire.
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).
I find it interesting how Huawei was able to make a nearly brand new microkernel operating system in a short amount of time, meanwhile Google with Fuchsia...
Despite it being Huawei, I am interested to see how well the OS plans out.
Fuchsia was a success for its developers: they created something new and shiny at Google, which would allow them to receive their promotion.
HarmonyOS NEXT is probably a lot more existential for Huawei.
Honestly, I think Fuchsia was fine, there's just no reason to deploy it yet.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that L4 kernel was an inspiration.
Looks like a whole new OS to find exploitation for. Interesting.
>Unlike previous iterations of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps.
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.
> If you live outside of China and don't know Mandarin
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.
Are you sure those everything aren't just bunch of third party janky WebViews, only relevant because of private chat app account moat?
("third party" and "private" parts are relevant, IMO, otherwise Twitter superapp-ification had happened years ago)
Maybe, but that is just implementation detail.
My point is that 3td party apps do not make much sense in China. They are useless without support from super app
Sounds nice at first until you look to see what places these apps are also linked too in mainland China.
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.
What would they offer outside China? They still don’t have access to android.
I never remember the clear lines.
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 ?
thanks; that explains why the en and ru variants of https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/develop/ have limited information.
> Huawei did try to export the last version of the OS – and even offered assistance to developers who coded for the platform and targeted offshore markets – without success.
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.
Huawei or other Chinese companies are not particularly good at developer support. Maybe it's cultural or large corp or both. I have heard some bad stories about Ali cloud too. They are usable, but not particularly easy to use.
You can really see Huawei’s roots as a telecom vendor here.
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.
Indeed. I don't have much technical expertise in the kernel/OS space, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. On the other hand, their dev experience is akin to opening a router paper manual. There is an opportunity here but I am not sure how it can be unlocked.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux.
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...
>it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in
That's what Apple has been doing for nearly 20 years now.
I think it is good that we have a non-Google, non-Apple OS for mobile phones out there though I am guessing that the surveillance state will be in full operation in Harmony OS as well.
The reason Huawei has a distinct non-Google Android flavour poisons the whole endeavour. Huawei is registered on the US Entity List.
You can have the surveillance gulag of Google, or the surveillance gulag of the CCP. Pick your poison.
I am way too much of a small fry for the CCP to give a single fuck about me.
Google, on the other hand, can have a massive influence on my day to day life.
https://grapheneos.org/ Which has it's own set of issues, but there are choices.
>Huawei hopes to bring its OS to PCs, too. Last month the chair of the Chinese giant's consumer business group, Yu Chengdong, revealed it would no longer run Windows on its future machines, but Harmony OS instead
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 the cost to Microsoft if there is a rigorous political effort by the CCP to move all Chinese desktop consumption away from Windows and Office Suite to open source (local) alternatives.
That's a cost to microsoft, sure, but probably a much bigger cost to china.
I like Linux, but porting a country's software on linux is no trivial task.
The more incompatible mobile OSes, the more the Web will come back. Cool.
> Huawei makes divorce from Android official
What do I read as a non-native speaker?
> Now you can divorce easily using Android phone from Huawei
"Divorce" here means "separate entirely". So
> Huawei makes divorce from Android official means "Huawei has officially separated from Android and will no longer be using it in any way".
The spyware in Chinese phones can make divorce easier, yes.
As opposed to US spyware?
No such thing. Instead we have corporate America spyware. And America using court power to access corporate spyware data.
You see this way America never gets spyware status. Neither does America get powerful enough that its backers become afraid of America.
Yeah well if you’re in the US you can’t really dodge US spyware, but you can dodge Chinese spyware.
Carve out your sovereignty where you can, yknow?
If you're in the US you should be dodging US spyware not Chinese spyware, since you're living under US power and laws.
I would be more interested in a OpenHarmony Desktop version. If it picks up on mainland and Asia in general it would be a proper 3rd desktop OS.
3rd desktop os? There are many more than 2 desktop oss already, am I misunderstanding you?
There are only two kernel architectures in use though: Unix-derived and Windows. This could make for a very different new entry
I guess they mean proper as in significant marketshare.
The os seems to be kind of open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenHarmony
From my understanding OpenHarmony is different from Harmony NEXT. The later is proprietary.
I believe Harmony NEXT is built on top of OpenHarmony?
Very interesting wikipedia info:
Written in: C, C++, JavaScript, ArkTS, Cangjie,[1] Rust, Assembly language and others
https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/cangjie/ (many alternative natural languages available in the dropdown; none of the ones I tried currently map) Looks algolish.
EDIT: according to https://blog.csdn.net/qiushi_1990/article/details/140528431 from 19.07.2024 those are the languages supported for writing apps, not necessarily the implementation language(s) for the μk?
> - 多语言开发支持 支持多种语言开发 如ArkTS和C/C++ 进一步提升了应用性能。
EDIT2: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/鸿蒙星河版 lists C,C++,Java
Hey, Tim Sweeney now has a third platform he can put the Epic Games Store and Fortnite on!
... except I bet we'll never see either of those come to HarmonyOS.
His friends at Tencent might have the desire and capability to do so.
If I were a CCP official I'd even relax some video game regulations when played on HarmonyOS to increase adoption. Under the guise of it having more 'safety' features or something like that.
There is a saying in Eastern Europe that the biggest driver of innovation is American sanctions. This seems to be the case here.
Also before they have something that's code was readable and people can see what the hell backdoors they have put. Now it's home run for surveillance
At least now I can choose who to spy on me.
You mean that now you can choose who to give your data to for free.
Everyone is spying on you.
I'd say that if you were worried before that on Chinese phones running Android there is something malicious but having some open source variant somewhere was protecting you somehow... you weren't paying much attention in this space for last decade+
exactly how we can read the MacOS, Windows and all the Google apps code that are bundled with virtually every Android phone, right?
If you live in the west and criticise your government, nothing happens. If you live in China and criticise your government, even in private, you can go missing or end up in a camp
This is very over simplified and glossing over a huge amount of political repression that happens in the west just because it's more sophisticated. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're free because you're not in China. You would realize this the second you go against any powerful interests
Try telling that to all those people punished for protesting against Gaza genocide. Not to mention Julian Assange.
Julian Assange was wanted for publishing confidential documents, not speaking out against the government.
Still nothing compared to china. But nice try.
Exactly how we can read source of Linux distros, GrapheneOS and multitude of other security focused Android forks, right.
So you are telling below you have nothing running linux? Lol