Hongmeng is a vast mist, a primordial chaos and a wild goose. Aside from 2,000+ year-old Chinese mythology, it’s also the name of the operating system that Huawei has been building for two years and just officially announced at its developer conference. Vast sounds apt, but chaotic and wild? That sounds more like every other attempt to build a rival OS to Android over the past decade.
Here’s what we know so far. Hongmeng, or Harmony OS in its international form, is a multi-device OS currently based on Linux that’s open source, compatible with Android apps and designed to power smart displays, wearables, smart speakers, VR smartglasses, in-car systems and PCs. Note that the list does not include smartphones, despite persistent rumours that Huawei plans to launch either a range of low-cost handsets or even a Mate 30 flagship phone with Hongmeng OS later in 2019.
Huawei’s official position on Android is still hazy, though that’s not a surprise. Richard Yu, head of the company's Consumer Business Group, compared Hongmeng to Android, Wear OS, iOS and Google’s upcoming Fuchsia – claiming it is both faster and more secure than Android. He also said that in future, Huawei might not use Android on its smartphone devices. A Huawei PR rep later tweeted: “If you are going to talk about Harmony OS please don’t call it a replacement for Android. It’s an OS with a bigger vision… It’s an OS for IoT products like the Honor Vision and we at Honor are 100 per cent committed to Android for smartphones.”
Against the backdrop of a US-China trade war and specifically the placing of Huawei on the US government’s Entity List in May, though, no-one at Huawei knows what Donald Trump will do next or how US based and even European suppliers and partners will react. Huawei saying it is 100 per cent committed to Android is all very well but what does that really mean in 2019?
Since 2008, when the first Android phone, the HTC Dream/G1, was released, the big product manufacturers have taken various shots at Android and its offshoots, all ending in failure. In smartphones, the most high profile is Samsung’s experiments with Tizen, with success at the low-end and mid-range in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East but now seemingly relegated to its smartwatch line-up. The last new Tizen phone was the Samsung Z4 in May 2017 and support for the My Galaxy app was killed back in January.
Another attempt to be the third smartphone OS, Windows Phone, also never took off despite promising features such as live tiles and deep Microsoft Office integration together with at times impressive hardware, particularly mid-range options from HTC and Nokia. It’s not totally dead yet – security and other updates for Windows 10 Mobile will end on December 10 – but both operating systems suffered from two fatal issues: a lack of third party apps and a hole where a clear proposition to differentiate it from Android should have been.
So why could Huawei succeed where Samsung and Microsoft failed? It has the resources – Huawei spent more than $15 billion (£12bn) on R&D in 2018 and the official line from Huawei’s top brass that Hongmeng OS has been in development since 2017 is probably Huawei being coy, with some leaks suggesting work could have started as far back as 2012.
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In 2018, Huawei debuted its lightweight Lite OS for smartwatches on the Huawei Watch GT, citing Wear OS’ poor battery life as the main reason for the switch away from Google. Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) has been in the wilderness for years; only the continued interest of Fossil Group, and its designer brands Skagen, Michael Kors and Diesel, has kept it in the conversation. LiteOS, which successfully trades functionality for a 14 day battery life on the Watch GT, will make up the first version of Hongmeng together with the Linux kernel and HarmonyOS microkernel. The second version, due in 2020, will ditch Linux and LiteOS.
It has the training from ten years of working with Google – Huawei’s first Android phone, the U8220, was announced at MWC 2009 – and ten years of learning from Microsoft and Samsung’s mistakes. CEO Ren Zhengfei, not specifically addressing the smartphone category, told Le Point in July that it will take Huawei “a few years” to be able to compete with Apple and Google and that it will require help from developers.
It has plenty of motivation. Samsung tried Tizen on for size but there was no sense of playing defence financially as here with Huawei, which in June was preparing for a year-on-year drop in smartphone sales between 40 and 60m outside China.
Perhaps most importantly, in the context of trade with the US, Huawei has, if not the whole of China, then big tech in China behind it which bodes well for building an app store and ecosystem. Global Times, the daily tabloid which is closely linked to the Chinese government, produced a story in June claiming that Xiaomi, Tencent, Oppo and Vivo were all testing Hongmeng OS.
Execs are lining up to position the operating system as a viable alternative for Chinese industry and academia with Hongyi Zhou, CEO of security firm Qihu 360, suggesting Huawei make Hongmeng open source (it is) at Nanjing Tech Week in July. And according to Canalys, Huawei’s sales in China itself rose 31 per cent year-on-year in Q2 this year, with the US Entity List drama falling in the middle of that period.
We’re not going to lie, right now EMUI, Huawei’s Android skin, would definitely be in the bottom half of our ranking of smartphone user interfaces. Compared to the simplicity and polish of Google’s own Material design found on the Pixel series and Apple’s iOS, aesthetically it’s quite ugly and old fashioned to look at, with the kind of ‘bloatware’ that Samsung used to get accused of and has since managed to rein in.
Part of that problem is when phone manufacturers insist on pushing their own, usually inferior versions, of Google apps and services. Huawei has said that Hongmeng will work with Android apps so if and when this OS does appear on smartphones, it will be interesting to see how it is used both internationally and in China and what the relationship between Huawei’s OS and Android apps eventually becomes. Our cosmetic and development issues with EMUI aside, we’ve every reason to think that Hongmeng should be a good alternative across all product categories. More than that, it needs to be.
The first Hongmeng device will in fact be the Honor Vision, due to be announced at a press event in Shenzhen on August 10. We’re expecting some sort of smart display or TV of unknown size and Honor has confirmed that it will run on Huawei’s new Honghu 818 chipset and include a pop-up camera. The press invitation refers to Honor “venturing into an unprecedented category” and a “bold attempt at something new and exciting, a sign of the future.” At best, it could shake up smart TVs and signal some of what Huawei could do with smartphones, at worst it could be the stuff of the Facebook Portal team’s most terrifying dreams.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
