Huawei Wants To Take Homegrown HarmonyOS Phone Platform Worldwide

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. “We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world,” Huawei’s rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week. Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.

“In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS,” Xu said. According to Huawei’s rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is “communicating with developers” on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. “This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers,” he claimed. “Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps — and thousands of other apps — up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world,” Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS.

It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.