Text: Jiang Jing.
Entering December, Huawei's HarmonyOS system "Circle of Friends" continued to expand and entered a stage of rapid expansion, and the intensive signing may be related to major changes in the HarmonyOS version.
On December 9, at the 2023 Huawei Pollen Annual Meeting, Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei, said that Huawei will launch very leading, innovative, and disruptive products next year. Yu Chengdong also predicted that Huawei will launch HarmonyOS native application and native experience products next year, which will be the real king of the entire Chinese terminal operating system.
Previously, the news that "HarmonyOS is no longer compatible with Android" continued to ferment. Does this mean that HarmonyOS will be independent?Can it be compared with Android and iOS?
Accelerate the expansion of the circle of friends
Since Huawei announced the full launch of HarmonyOS native applications in September, various enterprises have begun to appear intensively in the "circle of friends" of the HarmonyOS ecosystem, and there are more and more "friends" with HarmonyOS.
On December 7, after Ant Group's MPAAS and DingTalk, Alipay and Huawei announced their cooperation to launch Alipay's HarmonyOS Harmony native application development based on HarmonyOS Next, becoming another head platform partner to start HarmonyOS native application development.
Yu Chengdong said at the signing ceremony: "The cooperation between Huawei HarmonyOS and Alipay is a milestone, and we call on ideal partners to build, co-create, and share the new HarmonyOS ecosystem. ”
According to the official WeChat of "Flush Intelligent Technology", on December 7, Flush and Huawei held a ceremony for the completion of the comprehensive cooperation and development of the beta version of the original application, announcing that the beta version of the Flush Hongmeng native application has been completed, and will continue to promote the development of the full versionOn December 6, McDonald's China also reached a HarmonyOS cooperation agreement with Huawei, announcing that the McDonald's China app will start HarmonyOS native app development based on HarmonyOS Next.
Back in HarmonyOS 4At the time of the release of 0, Huawei held a signing ceremony for HarmonyOS ecosystem cooperation with nearly 40 partners, including Xiaohongshu, China Merchants Bank, Ctrip, Meitu, 58.com, 360 Browser, etc.
According to Huawei's latest data, nearly half of the top 20 mobile Internet applications have started the development of HarmonyOS native applications, and enterprises and developers in various fields including social networking, audio-visual, games, information, finance, and food have joined the construction of the HarmonyOS ecosystem. These include not only high-frequency applications such as Meituan, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and AutoNavi, but also subdivided track companies such as McDonald's, miHoYo, and Qunar.
Why are enterprises starting to join the development of HarmonyOS ecological applications?Pan Jun, director of global commodity strategy consulting at Bain & Company, believes that the Hongmeng system, as a domestically developed operating system, is conducive to reducing dependence on external technologies and enhancing the independent control of domestic mobile phone manufacturers. Secondly, the launch of the HarmonyOS system provides a new development platform for mobile application service providers, who can seize this opportunity to develop and promote their own applications, and gain the attention and support of the majority of users of the HarmonyOS system. In addition, the HarmonyOS system also has the advantage of being cross-platform, and can be developed and adapted on different devices, which also brings more business opportunities for application service providers.
"Pure-blood Hongmeng" is approaching?
According to public information, HarmonyOS is an intelligent terminal system released by Huawei, which is a distributed operating system based on microkernel for all scenarios. The first version of the system was HarmonyOS 1., which was launched in 20190,The first landing product is a smart screen,It has not yet been carried on the mobile phone system。
HarmonyOS 2 released in 2021Version 0, officially covered to mobile terminals such as mobile phones, the system officially entered the market. In July 2022, Harmony 3., which uses the Internet of Everything as a label0 was officially released, and the concept of "HarmonyOS World" was proposed for the first time. In August 2023, Harmony 40 officially released, after several iterations of versions, the current HarmonyOS 4The 0 system has been gradually applied to Huawei mobile phones, TVs, watches, smart cockpits and other products. As of August 4, 2023, the number of HarmonyOS ecological devices has reached 700 million.
It is worth noting that in the early days, HarmonyOS introduced some Android** in order to better compatible with Android and ensure the user experience. However, in the past three months, the news that "HarmonyOS is no longer compatible with Android" has continued to ferment.
It started with a decision announced by Huawei in August, when it announced a developer preview of HarmonyOS Next for developers. It is rumored that HarmonyOS Next's system base is self-developed and removes the traditional AOSP **Only supports the HarmonyOS kernel and HarmonyOS system applications, and can only use the installation package in HAP format. Therefore, this version is also nicknamed "pure-blooded Hongmeng" by netizens.
At the same time, the industry is also paying more and more attention to Hongmeng. Recently, a number of Internet companies have also posted development positions related to the HarmonyOS system on major job pages. For example, Meituan has posted a number of related positions on its social recruitment website, including HarmonyOS Senior Engineer and HarmonyOS Infrastructure Engineer. , Bytes, etc. have also successively released the positions of HarmonyOS development engineers.
Pan Jun believes that a number of Internet companies are recruiting HarmonyOS related positions, which means that HarmonyOS has attracted the attention and recognition of major Internet giants. The reason why these companies want to recruit for relevant positions is because they see that the HarmonyOS system may become an important competitive platform in the future, or they hope to obtain better business opportunities through cooperation with the HarmonyOS system. "Through the participation and support of Internet giants, it is possible for domestic mobile phone self-developed operating systems to obtain more resources and cooperation opportunities to enhance competitiveness. ”
Ma Jihua, founder of Beijing Darui Management Consulting, pointed out that the development of HarmonyOS native apps by domestic parties is still in its infancy. This is mainly due to the fact that the HarmonyOS system has been released for a short period of time, and developers have not known and mastered it for long enough. In addition, the development language and technical framework of the HarmonyOS system are different from those of other operating systems, requiring developers to relearn and adapt to Xi, which also increases the difficulty and workload of development.
Three points of the world?
On December 9th, Yu Chengdong said at Huawei's pollen annual meeting: "Here I will leak a secret to you, next year Huawei will launch HarmonyOS native application and native experience products, which will be the real king of the entire Chinese terminal operating system." ”
Not long ago, there was also a ** report that a relevant person from Huawei said: In the future, iOS, Hongmeng, and Android will be three independent systems, but the launch time is uncertain.
Before HarmonyOS, the last one to challenge Android and iOS in the field of mobile operating systems was Microsoft's Windows Phone. Windows Phone was launched in 2010 and was once very popular thanks to its alliance with Nokia. However, with the decline of Nokia, the market share of Windows Phone has also been declining, and it fell to 0 in the first quarter of 20171%。
In addition to the reasons for the failure of Windows Phone, some people believe that the low market share, immature ecosystem, and failure to keep up with the development of iOS and Android are the reasons for its failure. By analogy, if HarmonyOS wants to challenge Android and iOS, it will inevitably face these problems. It can be seen that in order to compete with Android and iOS, it is very important to develop the HarmonyOS ecosystem and accelerate the development of native applications.
It is understood that in order to support partners to develop more HarmonyOS native applications and meta services, Huawei has launched the HarmonyOS ecological partner development plan "Hongfei Plan", which intends to invest 10 billion yuan in HarmonyOS ecological partners in the next three years to accelerate the development of the "pure version of HarmonyOS" application ecosystem, which has been fully launched.
In 2020, Yang Haisong, then vice president of Huawei's consumer business software department, once said frankly: "Many giants have tried to make their own operating systems, including Microsoft, Blackberry and Nokia, the king of feature phones, they have all made their own operating systems, but we found that if the operating system wants to survive, the bottom line of market share is 16%, which is a life and death line." ”
According to data released by market research agency Counterpoint, in the first quarter of 2023, HarmonyOS will have a share of only 2% in the global mobile phone market, while iOS and Android will have a share of 20% and 78%, respectively. However, Huawei has previously mentioned that there is currently no plan to use HarmonyOS on overseas mobile phones, and overseas consumers can continue to use Android apps with confidence through Huawei phones equipped with the EMUI version.
Guo Tianxiang, senior analyst at IDC China, said that in the first three quarters of China's smartphone market in 2023, Android's share was 718%, iOS share 164%, Hongmeng share 118%。Since the launch of HarmonyOS in 2019, HarmonyOS has grown for 4 years. Guo Tianxiang believes that at present, the mainstream application developers have a lot of support for Hongmeng, and with the return of Huawei mobile phones, the market share continues to increase, and the share of Hongmeng in the domestic market will continue to increase. The improvement of mobile phones will also help promote the development of other HarmonyOS ecosystems.
Brand expert Xie Xiaowen pointed out that some people believe that the HarmonyOS system is no longer compatible with Android apps, which will cause Huawei to lose a large number of users and market share. In fact, as a latecomer, Hongmeng does face a lot of challenges if it wants to compete with iOS and Android at the market level. But HarmonyOS has the advantages of latecomers, such as learning from and Xi advantages of iOS and Android to avoid some mistakes. In addition, the HarmonyOS system has potential in areas such as the Internet of Things, edge computing, etc., which may be the key to future competition. "Although it is difficult for HarmonyOS to compete with iOS and Android in the short term, in the long run, it has a certain market competitiveness. ”
Synthesized from Beijing Business Daily, Yangcheng Evening News, etc.