There is no way back for pure-blooded Hongmeng: when will Huawei and Apple and Google divide the world?

Time Weekly

2024-06-24 11:18Published on the official account of Guangdong Times Weekly

Source of this article: Times Weekly Author: Yang Lingling

Unsurprisingly, the high-profile pure-blooded HarmonyOS NEXT became the focus of this year's Huawei Developer Conference.

When Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei, Chairman of the Device BG, and Chairman of the Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, lamented at the venue that "HarmonyOS has completed 30 years of travel in Europe and the United States in 10 years, and finally ushered in the 'light boat has crossed the Ten Thousand Mountains'", the audience applauded.

According to the schedule announced by Huawei, the native HarmonyOS consumer beta version will be released in August, and the native HarmonyOS consumer official version will be launched in the fourth quarter. This means that the commercial use of pure-blooded Hongmeng has entered the countdown.

Source: Photo by a reporter from Time Weekly

Before Huawei, there were countless tech giants who wanted to build operating systems. Whether it's Microsoft's Windows Phone system with Nokia, Samsung's Tizen system with Intel, or Alibaba's YunOS, all of them have failed.

At the beginning of the birth of Hongmeng, it was also not optimistic, and the industry believed that it was difficult for Huawei to create an independent operating system in a short period of time, and even called Hongmeng "Android skin", questioning that Huawei was just doing a crazy concept marketing.

Now, HarmonyOS NEXT has achieved full-stack self-development, and HarmonyOS has "gone solo" from the Android ecosystem, and Huawei has been able to make a name for itself. However, the consensus in the industry is that the biggest problem of the operating system is not the technology, but the ecology. As Gong Ti, President of Huawei's Device BG Software Department, said, HarmonyOS has completed the two major battles of base and experience, and the remaining battle is ecology. "If the ecology is successful, the harmony will be successful."

In the past six months, Huawei has spared no effort to promote application vendors to develop HarmonyOS native applications.

Ecological construction has a long way to go

The ecosystem of the operating system mainly includes two directions, one is to be backward compatible with various hardware, and the other is to provide interfaces upwards to cultivate more software APPs. The former is called south-facing, and the latter is called north-facing.

Huawei has internally calculated that the key to the success of an operating system lies in whether it can gain more than 16% of the market share.

At this developer conference, Yu Chengdong announced that the Hongmeng ecological device has exceeded 900 million units. According to the latest data released by research institute Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS's share of the Chinese market rose to 17% in the first quarter, surpassing Apple's iOS for the first time to become the second largest operating system in China.

In terms of global market share, Android and iOS both fell by 1% year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, with a share of 77% and 19% respectively; Huawei's global share of HarmonyOS has increased from 2% to 4%, which is still a long way from "one out of three in the world".

Industry insiders who have been observing Huawei for a long time told the Times reporter that since the beginning of this year, it is obvious that the focus of Hongmeng has shifted from the south to the north.

According to the data previously released by Apple, by the end of 2022, the App Store had more than 1.78 million apps, and the industry estimated that the number of apps on Android Google Play was more than 2.5 million. Hongmeng still has a big gap with them, and is trying its best to catch up.

Source: Photo by a reporter from Time Weekly

At present, the cooperation between Hongmeng and application manufacturers is not only conducive to improving the user experience, but also conducive to the independence of China's operating system.

People close to Tencent told the Times reporter that the development of the HarmonyOS native app is advancing. It is reported that in addition to Tencent Video, Tencent News, QQ Browser, Sogou Input Method, Tencent Self-selected Stocks, QQ Music, Kugou Music, Kuwo Music, National K Song, Lazy Listening, Starting Point Reading, many of its products are in the development and adaptation of the Hongmeng system, hoping to ensure a smooth, safe and stable transition to the new system as soon as possible.

At the same time, industry insiders close to Huawei said that the development of large-scale applications like WeChat takes a long time, and there will be many technical problems that need to be communicated and debugged in the process.

"For app vendors, the input-output ratio is a problem that must be faced head-on to build a third set of app development teams in addition to iOS and Android." Jiang Wei (pseudonym), who has been engaged in software development for many years, told the Times Weekly reporter that large manufacturers expect Hongmeng to bring incremental markets, but the Internet industry is currently generally implementing cost reduction and efficiency increase, and the manpower, material and financial resources spent on redevelopment need to be carefully calculated.

If application vendors and individual developers want to catch the fast train of HarmonyOS, they also need a certain learning cost. The most direct embodiment is that the development language of native HarmonyOS is mainly based on ArkTS, which is completely different from the Swift language used by iOS engineers and the Java language used by Android engineers. At the same time, the Times reporter learned that Huawei also launched its self-developed next-generation programming language "Cangjie".

Source: Provided by the interviewed companies

Of course, Huawei is also actively helping application vendors and developers. According to the data, there are currently 2,998 companies participating in the Hongmeng Ecological School, and the Hongmeng campus open class has entered more than 175 colleges and universities, and at the same time, more than 200 Hongmeng industry-university cooperation projects have been opened. In the process of working with ecosystem partners to develop HarmonyOS native applications, Huawei has also received hundreds of thousands of technical suggestions from developers.

According to Apple's official data, App Store developers' business and sales in the App Store ecosystem will reach $1.1 trillion in 2022.

Huawei also wants to build its own ecosystem. "Establishing a HarmonyOS native application ecosystem is the most critical thing for Huawei in 2024." Huawei's rotating chairman, Xu Zhijun, said at Huawei's analyst conference in April.

This is more like carrying a weight forward for Huawei. Before the pure-blooded HarmonyOS officially enters commercial use, Huawei must not only maintain the Android-compatible version, but also continue to expand the ecosystem of native applications, while maintaining the two systems is under huge pressure and the cost is not small. Fortunately, Huawei's operating performance has picked up, and the 2023 annual report shows that Huawei's global sales revenue reached 704.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.64%; net profit was 87 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 144.4%.

Pure-blooded Hongmeng

There is no way back

Since September 2023, Huawei has been actively reaching out to major domestic leading application companies, hoping that they will develop HarmonyOS native applications. At the end of 2023, Alipay, Meituan, Bilibili, AutoNavi Map and other companies have announced that they have reached agreements with Huawei to launch HarmonyOS native application development based on HarmonyOS NEXT.

At this conference, Yu Chengdong updated the process of HarmonyOS native applications: Up to now, all TOP 5000 applications have started native HarmonyOS development, 1500+ applications have been put on the shelves, and HarmonyOS native application development has been launched in many fields.

Yu Chengdong specifically mentioned that Meituan, in particular, as the first batch of application development companies to join the HarmonyOS ecosystem, completed the development of the core functions of HarmonyOS NEXT in only 6 weeks, and successfully ordered the first "HarmonyOS takeaway".

Subsequently, Yu Chengdong posted the first "native Hongmeng Weibo" on Weibo, saying that the Weibo development team completed the development of core functions in 8 weeks. "The current version already has some new experiences brought by the native HarmonyOS, and you can look forward to the commercial version to be released later this year." He said.

Xiaohongshu is the first app with more than 200 million MAUs (monthly active users) to complete the development of the native beta version of HarmonyOS. According to the bagpipe, VP of Xiaohongshu Technology, at present, the core function version of Xiaohongshu Hongmeng native application has been put on the shelves this month, and the full function of the commercial version will be put on the shelves in September.

Overall, large manufacturers are positive about joining the original Hongmeng, and data from the Zhaopin recruitment platform shows that the monthly salary range of Meituan's Hongmeng infrastructure engineer position is between 40,000 and 60,000 yuan; The monthly salary range of the front-end architect (Hongmeng direction) position released by JD.com is 4-70,000 yuan.

A person from a leading application manufacturer who participated in the meeting told the Times reporter that after the Mate 60 series mobile phones went on sale in August 2023, they reached a consensus with Huawei on the development of HarmonyOS native applications, and the development work will start at the end of 2023, with a team of more than 100 people.

"HarmonyOS is not a replacement for Android or iOS." At the Huawei Developer Conference, Gong Ti emphasized, "Developing HarmonyOS native applications is not simply about rewriting the code, but redesigning the user experience, so that even familiar functions can be refreshed." ”

Take AutoNavi map as an example, if you drive to a certain place, you need to open a driving navigation on the car map, and when you arrive at the parking lot, you need to use your mobile phone to open a walking navigation. In contrast, HarmonyOS NEXT can use driving navigation in the car, and the data will naturally flow to the mobile phone when you get out of the car, and automatically enable walking navigation, so that the two scenes can be smoothly connected.

Previously, Huawei revealed that after the official commercial use of HarmonyOS Next, the Open Harmony (open source Harmony) system used in cars and IoT devices in the past will be replaced, which is expected to achieve a complete connection with mobile phones at the system level, thus forming an ecological closed loop.

To this end, Huawei is doing big things quietly. According to Yu Chengdong, HarmonyOS NEXT has achieved full-stack self-development from the operating system kernel and file system, to programming languages, compilers/runtimes, programming frameworks, design systems, integrated development environments, AI frameworks, and large models.

After building a solid foundation, Huawei hopes to help developers get started as soon as possible and prosper the ecosystem. HarmonyOS NEXT also provides a comprehensive set of development courses and kits to make HarmonyOS native app development easy and efficient. For example, DevEco Studio, based on the intelligent kernel of Bifang IDE, improves the efficiency of cross-language coding by 75%, the compilation and construction speed by 80%, and the problem location time by 30%.

Source: Provided by the interviewed companies

In order to reduce the difficulty of adapting to the native HarmonyOS, Huawei has also built a full-link tool with application vendors, which can reduce the development workload by up to 90%. Currently, more than 350 SDKs (Software Development Kits) from 18 domains have been added to HarmonyOS NEXT, and more than 120 SDKs have been released in the SDK marketplace of application vendors.

"When I joined Huawei 31 years ago, I was a software engineer, but I was limited by the development language and development tools, and I had to write many lines of code to write a simple function. After the birth of HarmonyOS, we left the complexity to the development tools and the simplicity to the developers. Recently, Yu Chengdong said in a conversation with developers.

Behind Huawei's continuous gathering of application vendors and developers, the ecological construction of pure-blooded Hongmeng is still a long march, and Huawei has no way out, but Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said that "no retreat is the road to victory".

View original image 484K

• 

• 

• 

•