At the beginning of the new year, Huawei announced that the developer preview of HarmonyOS Next is open for developers to apply, and will launch a developer beta version in the second quarter of this year and a commercial version in the fourth quarter. At that time, the HarmonyOS will only support native apps and will no longer be compatible with Android apps. As a result, Hongmeng, which was born in 2019 and has undergone nearly 5 years of development, will enter a new stage of development, followed by a trade-off between opportunities and challenges.
It is undeniable that after nearly 5 years of development, Hongmeng's achievements are obvious to all. As of August 2023, the number of HarmonyOS ecosystem devices at the Huawei Developer Conference was 700 million, and after only 5 months, the number of HarmonyOS ecosystem devices has increased to 800 million.
As for the most core mobile phone business, Counterpoint data shows that at the beginning of 2022, HarmonyOS accounted for only 3% of the domestic mobile phone market, and by the end of 2022, it had increased to 8%; By the end of 2023, it will increase to 13% again, only one percentage point behind Apple's iOS. During the same period, Android's share fell from 79% to 73%, and iOS slipped from 18% to 14%. In this regard, TechInsights**, HarmonyOS will become the second largest smartphone operating system in the Chinese market from 2024.
On the corresponding application side, a research report released by Shengang** shows that by the end of 2022, the number of APPs monitored in the domestic market has reached 2.58 million. Assuming that Apple's iOS app store and third-party app marketplace each account for about 50%, the number of apps that can potentially migrate from Android to the native HarmonyOS could reach millions. Assuming that the average labor cost of each application migration is 40,000 to 50,000 yuan, the overall market size will reach 10 billion yuan, which is a huge market space for both Huawei and developers.
In response to this, Huawei expects that by the end of this year, 5,000 applications will have completed the development of native HarmonyOS, and the goal of the future HarmonyOS ecosystem is to support 500,000 applications.
However, Huawei still faces considerable challenges in building a completely independent, usable, and easy-to-use application ecosystem.
For example, the head application in the ecology is an important indicator, and there are more than 200 Hongmeng native apps that have been officially announced, while WeChat has not yet disclosed information, it is understood that the two sides are in continuous communication, after all, this kind of large-scale application development and migration at the national level is very complex.
In addition, how to make the HarmonyOS native app bring a unified and differentiated user experience compared to other operating systems, how to improve and encourage the transition of the Android development system, and how to allow more enterprises and developers to enter the HarmonyOS developer community are all challenges.
It is worth noting that the share of Hongmeng in the smartphone market announced by the above-mentioned research institutions, from the application side, Android-compatible applications should account for the "majority", and the new version of the operating system will no longer be compatible with Android, and the independent development of these applications will be a considerable project.
From the perspective of competition, only in the domestic market, even if Hongmeng surpasses Apple iOS in market share, but in view of other domestic mobile phone companies, such as "ov", Xiaomi, Honor and other mobile phone manufacturers are still dominated by the Android ecosystem, Hongmeng is still facing a lot of competitive pressure. More importantly, these mobile phone companies also claim to build their own mobile ecosystems in the future. From the perspective of the global market, due to the restrictions on the use of some apps in hardware such as Huawei mobile phones equipped with the HarmonyOS system, even if it becomes the world's third largest mobile ecosystem, the gap between it and Android and Apple's iOS ecosystem will be large, and how to break the overseas market, at least from the current point of view, Huawei has not yet found an effective way to deal with it.
To sum up, the author believes that from compatibility to native, the future of Huawei HarmonyOS can be described as the coexistence of opportunities and challenges, not only to see the opportunities in the challenges, but also to face the challenges in the opportunities, and weigh the relationship between the two, in order to achieve the set goals in the new advancement.
This article was published in Communication World Issue 937 February 10, 2024 Issue 3 Original title: "Entering a New Stage, Huawei HarmonyOS Moves from Compatibility to Native".