Huawei has grand plans for its HarmonyOS smartphone software, planning to have the new operating system running on 300m devices by the end of 2021. That figure would be reached by selling 100m new devices with native support, and upgrading the rest from Android.
The target was announced at last week’s Huawei global analyst summit and it was clear that, like Android, HarmonyOS would be a multi-device platform, also targeting smart TVs, IoT devices and potentially cars. This will be important at a time when Huawei’s smartphone shipments are falling, because of international restrictions but also loss of market share in China to other local rivals such as Oppo and Xiaomi.
HarmonyOS was hastily brought off the back burner when the USA imposed sanctions on Huawei, leading Google to cut off support for its services on the Chinese company’s devices. While Huawei could still use the open source code underpinning Android, it could no longer offer core Google applications such as Search and the Play Store. That did not matter too much in China, where Google services are largely excluded anyway, but in other markets, Huawei faces the uphill struggle to win users and partners for a brand new mobile OS, without being able to provide the Google apps on which many people rely almost by default.
So Huawei has had to pivot to its own operating system, for use across its portfolio of consumer electronics. In the early days of this switch, the marketing made it sound like HarmonyOS was fundamentally different to Android, but some exploratory poking suggests that HarmonyOS could be fairly described as a reskin of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) that forms the foundations of Android itself.
Huawei is planning on tying its many product lines together with HarmonyOS. At the start of the month, Huawei confirmed a new smart TV family, starting with the V65, as well as a suite of smart home products.
In the HarmonyOS keynote at the event in Shenzhen, Huawei’s Wang Chenglu, a senior figure in the consumer wing, said the operating system would unite devices, and this would be important as the smartphone-based Internet industry was now in a transitional period, with smartphone shipments falling and daily usage rates stalling.
“With users possessing more and more intelligent devices, we want to allow these devices to collaborate with each other more efficiently instead of running in isolation, just as humans can communicate with each other. The goal is to make ubiquitous connectivity a reality and transform multiple intelligent devices into one smart assistant,” said Wang.
Wang went on to describe a scenario in which a smart watch detects that a user has fallen asleep, triggering a collection of smart home devices to kick into action, and set a home up for the night. “However, as different devices run on different operating systems, it is difficult to connect them, let alone achieve intelligence. To realize a connected lifestyle, devices must communicate in one common language,” noted Wang.
Wang had opened the speech calling for industry collaboration, between upstream and downstream players, in order to build such an ecosystem together. Huawei hopes that HarmonyOS’ 300m devices are enough to kickstart such actions, but outside China itself, parts of APAC and MENA, Huawei is going to struggle to win that battle.
In markets where Huawei has not faced sanctions, typically those closer to home and where China itself wields more influence, it has a much better chance of creating such a smart home ecosystem. In Europe and North America, the situation is very different.
However, if under the skin HarmonyOS is just Android, then on a technical level, it shouldn’t be too difficult to create such interoperable devices. Of course, cloud-to-cloud integrations are much easier to configure than device-to-device ones, but good luck trying to get management to sign off on an API hook into Huawei, in this current political climate.
As for the claim about 300m devices in 2021, Huawei will shortly begin pushing HarmonyOS to its smartphones – a sign of the close relationship between HarmonyOS and the Android versions currently running on those devices. Recently, Huawei has had to use Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) as a replacement for Google’s Play suite of applications.
HarmonyOS first debuted in Huawei devices, launching in China, in September 2019. The initial unveiling of the operating system was focused on IoT devices, but due to the trade war, Version 2.0’s announcement extended the focus to smartphones, smart watches, smart TVs, and even head units for cars.
The first HarmonyOS devices were the Honor Vision and Honor Vision Pro smart TVs, unveiled in August 2019, under the Honor sub-brand. The devices used the Honghu 818 SoC, and offered 4K panels in a 55-inch housing – costing between $540 and $680. The Pro variant featured a pop-up camera and microphone array, for video calls, but both were also pitched as smart home hubs.
Based on recent Rethink TV projections, HarmonyOS-powered smart TVs are expected to account for an installed base of around 11.3m units this year, and grow to 97.8m in 2025 – eventually squeezing out the non-Google versions of Android in the Chinese market too. This would put HarmonyOS smart TVs at somewhere around 3.8% of total HarmonyOS devices this year.
That’s a solid enough base on which to build a smart home ecosystem, and to that end, Huawei says it already has 20 hardware and 280 software vendors involved in the HarmonyOS platform.