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Inside China Tech: can Huawei make sweet Harmony in 2021?
- China’s biggest technology company has opened the latest version of its Harmony operating system to developers around the world
- Huawei’s proprietary OS is crucial to the future of its smartphone business amid rigid US trade sanctions
Reading Time:4 minutes
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Hello, This is Bien Perez from the South China Morning Post’s Technology desk, with a wrap of our leading stories this week.
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About eight years ago, in a villa facing a lake in Shenzhen, a small group of senior Huawei Technologies executives headed by founder Ren Zhengfei held a closed-door meeting that lasted for several days.
Their mission was to brainstorm ideas on how Huawei should respond to the rising success of Google’s Android smartphone operating system (OS) around the world – software that it used on its own handsets. The underlying concern was that dependence on Android could render the company vulnerable to a US ban in the future.
That future has finally come to pass. In the face of rigid trade sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, Huawei on Thursday announced that its proprietary Harmony OS would be installed on all of its smartphones from next year.
“The latest version of Harmony OS has been officially opened to developers globally,” said Richard Yu Chengdong, chief executive of Huawei’s consumer business group, at the company’s developer conference held in the southern city of Dongguan.
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“The Huawei mobile service system now has 1.8 million app developers and 490 million active users, as well as 96,000 apps,” said Yu, adding that the company is accelerating the buildout of an app ecosystem around Harmony.
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