Huawei drops Android for HarmonyOS. How Google became a Casualty in a War it didn’t start.
Starting April 2021, flagship Huawei smartphones, running Android, will be able to upgrade to HarmonyOS.
All wars have collateral damage and unintended victims. And even when you win in some ways, you often loose. In the war between the US government and Huawei, the first unintended victim seems to be Google.
During the launch event of the foldable flagship Huawei Mate X2, Richard Yu, the CEO of the Huawei Consumer Group, briefly mentioned that from April 2021 users of some Huawei devices will be able to upgrade from Android to HarmonyOS.
From April 2021, the process of removing Android from the whole Huawei ecosystem starts.
HarmonyOS = EMUI 11 - Android
I may be wrong. But I have a feeling that HarmonyOS will look almost identical to EMUI 11 on the outside. EMUI stands for Emotion UI and it’s Huawei’s flavor of Android. It’s reasonable to assume that they’ve rewritten, redesigned, redeveloped the whole Android operating system from scratch. They learned a lot from adapting and customizing it over the years.
I have a Mate 40 Pro, which runs EMUI 11, and it is a very user-friendly experience. Although I always preferred stock Android over any customized flavors, IMUI 11 is different. It’s actually good. But you have to take into account it lacks some critically important services like a voice assistant, a search on par with Google, and installing apps is far from frictionless. This is because of all the sanctions, and Huawei needed an immediate solution. It currently relies heavily on Microsoft for inferior search, keyboard, and news. And most of the advanced Huawei services like the Celia Voice Assistant, the MeeTime Videochat, and the Huawei Email App are not yet available in my country. It seems reasonable that HarmonyOS will solve these issues over time.
Think of the switch from Android to HarmonyOS as upgrading an engine in your car. It will most probably drive faster, but inside it will still feel the same as the interior didn’t change.
Android Apps will run on HarmonyOS
Most, if not all, Android apps will be able to run on HarmonyOS, with little to no adaptation.
And if the application relies on Google Services, the developer will simply be able to replace these dependencies with alternatives provided by Huawei. And although these alternatives may not yet on the same level, they are catching up extremely fast.
Why is this a blow for Google?
Up until now, all smartphone makers had only one choice: Android. iOS was limited to Apple. There was zero competition. Everyone focused their attention on hardware and optimized their devices to run Android. They usually did try to customize Android, often with very mixed success, usually messing up the user experience.
Every time a user picked up an Android-powered device he or she entered the Google ecosystem, giving Google a life-long revenue stream on a cut of any transactions, app-revenue, advertising-revenue and on top of that always amassing more and more user data.
This golden era for Google is now coming to an end, at least for Huawei devices.
And it’s not just one of the small players dropping Android. Huawei is the global leader in wearables and before the sanctions, also led in smartphone sales in 2020. It’s estimated Huawei sold over 200 million smartphones in the past years. It’s reasonable to assume Huawei will do its best to ‘upgrade’ those devices to HarmonyOS.
Every Huawei Android device sold was a revenue booster for Google.
Final Thoughts
Politics should stay out of technology and innovation, and let the free market decide.
Short term wins for Apple, but long-term toxicity of US tech
It’s hardly fair that Apple was able to dethrone Huawei in sales, thanks to help from the US government. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Huawei, just like most Chinese tech companies, will see any technology linked directly or indirectly with the US as toxic from now on. And since the US government interfered it shouldn’t be a surprise the Chinese government will too.
I don’t think Huawei initially wanted to build a new operating system. It contributed to Android and promoted it for years. But continuing to use it now or work with any US tech company doesn’t really make sense anymore.
In China, it takes a really long time to build trust, and once broken it's not easily fixed.
From Market Leader to Underdog
Today Huawei is the underdog, fighting not only against Apple, Samsung, and many other competitors but also against the US government. Think about that for a moment. Any other company would have already been destroyed. Not Huawei though.
It’s refreshing to see Huawei not just survive, but release a new flagship foldable smartphone, which technically clearly outshines the Samsung Galaxy Z2.
I always had a soft spot for underdogs. And I’ll enjoy watching the next chapter in the Huawei story from my Mate 40 Pro.
