Pan Zhengyu: The Hongmeng system and Android are completely cut, what are the chances of winning in the future?

Observer.com

2024-06-21 19:35Posted on the official account of Shanghai Observer.com

[Text/Observer Network Columnist Pan Zhengyu]

"Huawei has been put in a position by history that if you don't advance, you will retreat, there is no way to turn back, and if you miss the historical development opportunity, you will be wiped out."

In 1992, Huawei President Ren Zhengfei led his team to go abroad for the first time and made the above assertion on American soil. Since then, this sentence has been frequently invoked at many key moments of Huawei's development, just like the IP that has been repeatedly verified. June 21, 2024 Huawei Developer Conference. Once again, it showed the magic of foresight as it deserved.

During the keynote speech at the developer conference, the launch of the beta version of HarmonyOS NEXT, the improvement of the ecosystem, and native applications accounted for two-thirds of the event. According to Huawei's official announcement, the HarmonyOS NEXT Beta Edition base is self-developed across the board, removing the traditional AOSP code, and only supports the application of the HarmonyOS kernel and the HarmonyOS system, reducing the redundant code by 40%, greatly improving the system's smoothness, energy efficiency, and pure security features.

At this point, HarmonyOS will be completely cut from Android and will no longer be backward compatible, and a real "HarmonyOS moment" has arrived.

A number of senior analysts in the mobile phone industry coincidentally told the observer.com: This may be the biggest event in China's IT industry in 20 years, and it can achieve a three-legged stand with Apple's iOS and Android, and the consumer electronics ecological change will be enough to shock the world.

At the developer conference, Huawei summarized the three major features of HarmonyOS NEXT

Can the market share reach 16%? HarmonyOS is crossing the line of life and death

The content of this developer conference is also in line with the statement of Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun in April - building a HarmonyOS native application ecosystem is the most critical thing in 2024, and it can be said that the iteration of HarmonyOS is the highest point of Huawei's strategic route this year, and its significance is more than the release of new 5G mobile phones, the Pangu large model, and the upgrade of the Ascend series processors.

Since 2024, we have seen many new moves by Huawei in the original HarmonyOS application. In April, Zhijie S7 started mass delivery, and it also became one of the flagships of Huawei Hongmeng Zhixing, before that, Alibaba Cloud, AutoNavi map, Weibo, B station, Xiaohongshu, iQiyi, Himalaya, CCTV, Meituan, WPS Office, China Merchants Bank and other head applications have completed the development of the test version of HarmonyOS NEXT App, and started the development of HarmonyOS native applications.

Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei and Chairman of the Device BG, introduced at the scene that Huawei strives to fully migrate 5,000 applications that have been used by smartphones for more than 99% of the time in the Chinese market to the HarmonyOS native operating system this year, and 1,500 have been completed so far.

The operating system supported by a large number of smart terminals, whether it is Apple iOS, iPadOS, etc., or Android system, seems to have a potential incremental market of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but from the perspective of market share, the operating system is an all-or-nothing life-and-death battlefield. Nokia, Microsoft, Meizu and other lessons have repeatedly shown that the market share of an independent operating system cannot reach a certain numerical critical point, and the growth qualifications accumulated before are very likely to be quickly eroded by competitors in a short period of time, from 10% to 0% may only take 18 months.

Wang Chenglu, known as the "father of Hongmeng", Huawei's former president of the terminal BG software department, once said that the Hongmeng system can only be regarded as the first step to survive if it breaks through the 16% "life and death" market share. According to data released at last year's Huawei Developer Conference, the number of devices upgraded to HarmonyOS 4 has reached 60 million, with an average of 1.2 million users added every day. Based on the data of extensive market research, based on the data of the previous Huawei President Ren Zhengfei, based on the application scenarios of home appliances, mobile phones, and smart cars covered by HarmonyOS Open Source, it has exceeded 600 million terminals, and this year it has exceeded 900 million, compared with the number of iOS and Android terminals, it has basically passed the 16% survival threshold.

The number of users is the "blood" of the HarmonyOS operating system, and its "soul" depends on the majority of developers around the world, which is also the biggest gap between HarmonyOS and the top two competitors, that is, it needs a vast platform to allow developers to gather wisdom.

At the 2023 China International Embedded Conference, Huang Bo, Director of the Operations Department of Huawei Developer Alliance, said that in addition to 6-1 billion end users, the lifeline of HarmonyOS must also reach 10 million developers. Today, HarmonyOS has gathered 2.54 million developers.

In this regard, Zhu Jiatao, a senior analyst at Canalys, a well-known consumer electronics consulting agency, also said in an interview with Observer.com that from the perspective of pure technology development, it is not difficult for HarmonyOS to be no longer compatible with Android, and the biggest bottleneck is to pull all mainstream APPs into the native HarmonyOS ecosystem, and accumulate a large number of developer resources.

In August 2023, HarmonyOS's market share rose to 8%, while Android and iOS accounted for 72% and 20% respectively in the same period. It can be said that when Hongmeng Ecology decides to walk independently, it is at the moment of life and death when it crosses the line of life and death.

The whole scene is unified and ecological, and Hongmeng is stepping on the "corpses" of Nokia and Samsung

The first key word for the launch of HarmonyOS NEXT, which is an all-scenario intelligence, is a unified ecosystem and a unified experience.

We believe that Huawei's senior management and the original developers who are in charge of the HarmonyOS project have carefully studied the deep reasons why Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung and others have failed to challenge Android and iOS. So, since the ambitious feature phone boss back then, and Samsung, which had just begun to eat the first wave of Android dividends, all ended in a fiasco, what landmines did they step on for Huawei Hongmeng?

15 years ago, the mobile operating system was still in the barbaric growth period of "Qin lost its deer, the world chased it", and there were mobile phone manufacturers with ambitions to develop an independent operating system, as well as Nokia and Samsung, but the former's Symbian OS and the latter's BADA have been defeated, becoming a dry bone in the eyes of Android and iOS.

The reasons for the failure of Symbian and BADA can be divided into two dimensions, one is a major mistake in the strategic research and judgment of the underlying architecture and market competition of the operating system, and the other is that it has not built enough volume to "mature" and "feed" the operating system.

Symbian's embedded operating system lost valuable testing time and space due to its obsession with idealized security models and the precipitous decline in Nokia's mobile phone market share. Samsung's BADA, which was one step behind Symbian, also failed to make a wave, and a handful of developers were co-opted by Android. In the face of many operating system platforms, fragmented developers are often faced with the life-and-death game of "one peach kills three soldiers", seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages, in contrast, Android is obviously more suitable as a safe haven for start-up developers.

Nokia Symbian System (@TheVerge)

After Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone business, the Symbian system was transformed into a Windows phone system, but a big mistake in this move was that when the scale of the application software ecosystem had not yet formed a prototype, it rashly opened its core application software to its opponents, such as windows office to open windows to Android, and the result was that Android broke into the door and eroded Microsoft's market share and stabilized the situation of the two worlds with iOS. For Nokia and Microsoft's mobile operating systems, this is a very typical real-life version of the "Seven Tricks to Death".

Nokia's Symbian, Samsung's BADA, and the previous BlackBerry OS have an average survival time of more than 4 years, and these lessons can become a beacon on the way forward for Huawei's HarmonyOS OS.

In addition, it is worth mentioning that in August 2019, when Hongmeng 1.0 was released, Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei, mentioned twice that Google is still mysterious to the outside worldFuchsia system, he pointed out that Fuchsia is also based on microkernel and can be adapted to various hardware terminals, but Fuchsia is not yet a distributed design, and the performance is average, but HongmengOSInteros is the world's first full-scene distributed OS based on microkernel, based on such technology. The distributed soft bus allows multiple terminals under the same account to realize the invocation of hardware capabilities between terminals.

Compared with Hongmeng, Google officials rarely set some kind of set goals for the Fuchsia operating system, but the purpose of its existence overlaps with Hongmeng, that is, to eliminate the disadvantages of fragmentation of the Internet of Things. According to the basic logic of software manufacturing, I am afraid that no company understands the boundaries of Android better than Google. Less than 5 years after Android's birth, Google began to systematically build an important cross-platform operating system initiative - Fuchsia, which, like HarmonyOS, uses an open source and microkernel system.

Years later, Fuchsia is still at a lower level of reaching the table. In other words, its imaginary enemy on mobile is Apple's iOS, and on the PC side, it is aimed at Microsoft's Windows.

Google's Fuchsia operating system

In a sense, the Google open-source community has conducted a comprehensive test of the Honor Play smartphone based on the Kirin 970 chip with test code, and the same open-source Fuchsia (which no longer uses the Linux kernel, but is based on the Zircon microkernel) objectively acts as an incubator for HarmonyOS 2.0.

Compared with these predecessors, one of Huawei's major advantages is that it has a strong self-developed product matrix focusing on consumer terminals. Zhu Jiatao pointed out that Microsoft and Google have been lacking hardware-level flagship products, lacking some anchors in software and hardware collaboration, and both sides have made a lot of money on the share of the application market, and there is not enough motivation for further research and development against Android and iOS.

On the other hand, Huawei, in August 2023, the Mate 60 series mobile phones equipped with Huawei's self-developed chip Kirin 9000S were launched, which ignited the enthusiasm of Chinese consumers and became a popular model in China's domestic mobile phone market. There is no doubt that Huawei's decades of in-depth cultivation in the fields of communication terminals, smart homes, and mobile phones have paved the way for the accelerated commercialization of HarmonyOS NEXT. However, Zhu Jiatao told the Observer that Huawei will not rush to incorporate all mobile phone models into the HarmonyOS NEXT architecture for the time being, but will choose a gradual process, which involves the combination of software and hardware.

An overseas developer also pointed out on social media (as shown below) that Huawei's style of play is similar to Apple's, and Apple's PC was gradually separated from the x86 architecture, and to this day, the Apple operating system under the x86 architecture can still receive macOS update information, until one day macOS completely terminates the update information service to x86.

（@quora）

从HarmonyOS 1到HarmonyOS NEXT

At the developer conference held in Dongguan in August 2019, Huawei "HarmonyOS is the beginning, chaos is beginning". HarmonyOS (HarmonyOS), which was still holding the pipa, was officially born; In mid-August 2020, after Huawei's mobile phone chips were "completely cut off", the outside world is also looking forward to asking what position the progress bar of the new generation of Huawei's HarmonyOS ecosystem is in.

Looking back at the methodology of HarmonyOS from 1.0 to 2.0, the evolution path at that time was already giving birth to the seeds of HarmonyOS's independence and take-off in the future.

At that time, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, announced at the developer conference that Huawei mobile phones will fully support HarmonyOS 2.0 in 2021. Since then, HarmonyOS has been iterating steadily and orderly. Since then, we can see that the various versions of HarmonyOS are closely aligned with the initial version, and there is almost no sense of disagreement between the self-development path due to the changes in the external situation, which also reflects the determination of enterprises in the increasingly urgent situation of sanctions.

At the beginning of Hongmeng, Huawei put a lot of effort into how to maintain the controllable expectations of public opinion on the two points of Hongmeng's reality and possibility. At the developer conferences for many years, Yu Chengdong has repeatedly emphasized that the technical logic of the HarmonyOS system is not confrontation and competition, but a necessary ecological echelon replacement. From the very beginning, HarmonyOS has adopted a compromise strategy, using a dual-framework system, including Huawei's self-developed HarmonyOS kernel and open-source code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), so that the system can run both HarmonyOS native applications and Android applications. It can be seen that Huawei has reduced the sense of public opinion on HarmonyOS and Google's Android and iOS mobile terminal customers as much as possible, and correspondingly diluted the self-help characteristics of operating system research and development in the context of chip supply outages.

This way of dealing with it not only retains the possibility of further cooperation with Google, but also adds a lot of rare room for maneuver for Huawei to expand the fault tolerance rate of HarmonyOS, so as to avoid letting HarmonyOS fall into the trap of "pseudo-Android" interpreted by some overseas media.

Based on this, we can understand that at the beginning of the birth of Hongmeng, it maintained a subtle sense of distance from the mobile phone terminal. Ren Zhengfei said in an interview with French media Le Point that HarmonyOS itself "is used for the Internet of Things, such as autonomous driving and industrial automation, because it can accurately control the delay below five milliseconds, and even reach the millisecond to sub-millisecond level." Therefore, HarmonyOS based on the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) can also cleverly avoid the zero-sum game discourse of Google and Apple winner-take-all.

HarmonyOS puts the core point of differentiation and competition with Apple's iOS system on the word "open source". At the 2020 developer conference, Yu Chengdong also clarified the open source time node of Hongmeng 2.0, which was expected to be open source for memory 128MB-4GB terminal devices by April 2021, and open source for all devices above 4GB after October, and the improvement of version 2.0 compared with version 1.0 is that the former will be extended to more smart devices, including wearable devices and mobile phones, of course, this is also the focus of Huawei's consumer terminal business, undoubtedly, this process and improving EMUI construction capabilities are carried out simultaneously.

In short, we can find that the creation of Huawei's HarmonyOS system is a path of Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Spring", which is "extremely narrow at the beginning, and only then can people get through", and the technical path seems to be very narrow under the pressure of Android and iOS, but after taking the first step, the application prospect is indeed infinitely broad.

If Huawei wants to learn from the strengths of Android and iOS, it needs to deeply understand and combine the strengths of both. iOS operating system since 2007, after more than ten years of version evolution, the upgrade process is meticulous, relying on the strict control of module permissions and a relatively closed system, to ensure that the security of the operating system and the evolution of the route is highly consistent, and based on the Linux four-layer structure of free and open source Android, has also been upgraded to several versions, its biggest problem is security and inevitable terminal fragmentation.

Huawei Hongmeng system1.0demoversion,Maybe it takes into account the characteristics of the Internet of Things itself,It does not use a mobile phone as an access point as expected by the outside world,Instead, smart TV was chosen,Of course, another consideration is likely to be that smart TV can better reflect the intuitiveness of the Internet of Things in a venue of thousands of people。 Further, HarmonyOS strives to establish a cross-terminal ecological sharing system, and in order to achieve a seamless cross-terminal collaborative experience, it is necessary to achieve modular coupling, so we found that HarmonyOS uses a distributed operating system for all scenarios, which is not unfamiliar to the industry but is highly controversial.

An overseas developer realized one of the major advantages of HarmonyOS three years ago: one system runs through different terminals (@quora)

At that time, the architecture of HarmonyOS made a specific and micro processing of the Linux kernel, stripped away the device driver and file system, and only retained the resource management program with basic functions such as processing time, memory, communication and terminals, because the degree of integration was lower, so it was called "micro kernel", which was different from the Android and iOS macro kernels that integrated the troika of file system, device driver and resource management. By taking out the file system and device drivers separately and doing modular coupling, you can make flexible and very flexible deployment of different devices, and other hardware can call these coupling modules more conveniently, providing a complete set of cooperation mechanisms for close interaction between devices.

For example, high-magnification astronomical telescopes, speakers, and projectors can be connected to make a real-time documentary about the movement of the stars after the hardware modules of Huawei's HarmonyOS system are coupled.

We can make an analogy with the macro kernel of Android and iOS and the microkernel of HarmonyOS in the national administrative organizational structure. The macro core is like the centralized power system of counties and counties with a high degree of central instruction collection, the household is unified with the people, the government decrees and laws are vertically integrated, and the local sections only have the right to coordinate up and down, sacrificing the freedom of autonomy in exchange for the indiscriminate radiation of instructions; The Hongmeng microkernel adopts the ripping and sealing system, whether the fief is barren or rich, it is modular, the central government transfers financial and personnel powers, and what is compensated is the joining of more "princes", as well as the two-way security of the central and local governments, because the microkernel naturally does not have and does not need ROOT permissions, each layer is threaded and scheduled, put in the microkernel, and then lock each module, the outer core services are isolated from each other, and it is impossible to break through the central with a tiger symbol (instruction set) alone, This completes the integration optimization for Android and iOS.

Macro kernel (left) and microkernel (right) comparison

In addition, HarmonyOS can also use the Ark compiler to transform the original Android APP to improve the smoothness, response speed and computing performance of the system (from the perspective of 2021, the conclusion that HarmonyOS was theoretically 60% faster than Android was not without theoretical basis).

结语 HarmonyOS NEXT的AI基因与挑战

Since the beginning of 2023, generative AI is setting off an epoch-making ICT industry revolution around the world. Suddenly, whether in the cloud or on the device side, the LLM model has been in a state of contention. New concepts such as AI PCs and AI mobile phones have been born, and the in-depth expansion and implementation of application scenarios and new product forms such as autonomous driving, smart home, smart city, and humanoid robots have been superimposed, and the capital market is eagerly pursuing related concept stocks, and the era of the Internet of Everything with AIGC as the traction is accelerating.

The intelligent roadmap of iOS announced at the Apple developer conference not long ago once again shows that the strong coupling of the operating system and AI is a necessary way. Huawei's HarmonyOS 4.0 system, released in August 2023, combines the capabilities of Huawei's Pangu model to enable voice assistant Xiaoyi to have a natural conversation with users.

However, the beta version of HarmonyOS NEXT has just hit the road, and the future of synchronous iteration of the system and AI algorithms is also full of thorns.

First of all, the development and maintenance of HarmonyOS applications will bring a new expense and higher labor costs, especially Huawei has been touting HarmonyOS self-development rather than using universal development tools, it is necessary for developers to learn through training, many software companies can only let Android or iOS developers switch to HarmonyOS application development, Meituan used 6 weeks of high-intensity training, with the scale and determination to fight the "war of annihilation" to let more than 100 developers within the company expedite the docking with HarmonyOS (as shown below), This is probably difficult for the majority of small and medium-sized app developers to do.

Secondly, Huawei said that there is currently no plan to use HarmonyOS on overseas mobile phones, and overseas consumers can continue to use Android apps with confidence through Huawei phones equipped with the EMUI version. Huawei is still unable to break through Google's "family bucket" stuck neck in overseas mobile phones, and cannot obtain practical feedback and AI data feeding from foreign developers on the development process of HarmonyOS, so it can only seek the increment of domestic developers in the form of internal circulation, and at least 6 million developers need to continue to join in from the 10 million level, and the Long March has only completed the first step.

Finally, with the grafting of the Pangu model and the HarmonyOS NEXT beta version, there are still many gaps from ToB to ToC applications that need to be further bridged in terms of training and inference.

However, the advantage of HarmonyOS is that it has jumped out of the trap of the mobile operating system war from the beginning, but guided the microkernel full-scene distributed OS with a higher and broader LoT concept, and under the guidance of stronger R&D determination and route guidelines, supplemented by a large number of mature terminal markets in China, we look forward to HarmonyOS NEXT at the same time next year.

This article is an exclusive manuscript of the observer.com, and the content of the article is purely the author's personal opinion, which does not represent the views of the platform, and shall not be reproduced without authorization, otherwise legal responsibility will be pursued. Pay attention to the WeChat guanchacn of the observer network and read interesting articles every day.

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