Huawei Planning to Keep Android, but Replace Google Apps and Services
After all thespeculations surrounding Huawei’s Harmony OS(known asHongMeng in China) and repeated assertions from the company’s founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei, on how it mayreplace Android in future smartphonesfrom the company, it turns turns out a full Android replacement was never on the firm’s agenda in the first place. According to Huawei’s VP of public relations, Joy Tan, Huawei does not need to replace Android, it only needs an alternative to Google Mobile Services (GMS).
According to Tan, the Chinese telecom giant is already working on ‘Huawei Mobile Services’ (HMS) to replaces Google apps and services, but it will take a long time to replace Google as the platform of choice for smartphone users outside China. While the company is understood to have been already working on an IoT operating system of its own, work on the technology started in earnest following theUS-imposed sanctionsthat arepreventing US companiesfrom doing business with it.
It’s worth noting here that theMate 30 and Mate 30 Prohave already launched without Google services; a critical functionality that many believe might affect their global sales significantly. Thanks to the ongoing trade war between the US and China, the devices are thefirst Huawei smartphones to lack official Google support, which means even though they run Android, they don’t have access to any official Google apps and services, including Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube etc.
It will be interesting to see if Huawei will be able to lure enough developers to port their apps over to its own platform, but given that the company already has a massive (Android) user base in China, it may still be an easier task to get developers to support its Android-based platform than to shift everybody over to a new OS altogether.
Kishalaya Kundu
Passionate techie. Professional tech writer. Proud geek.
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