14 DAY TRIAL // Back in mid-May 2019, the United States government decided to impose new sanctions against Huawei, essentially blocking the company from doing any kind of business with American companies.
For Huawei’s smartphone business, this meant the company was no longer allowed to use Android or Google services, therefore forcing the company to look elsewhere for an operating system to power its devices.
Needless to say, Huawei didn’t have too many options, but given its resources and know-how, it was pretty clear that the best way to go was an in-house built operating system.
And two years later, Huawei is finally ready to officially launch it internationally, with the company’s Android replacement projected to see the daylight on June 2.
Huawei has published a teaser video to announce the debut of HarmonyOS, suggesting that the company is finally ready for a future without Android and Google services.
To launch in a few days
Still based on Android, HarmonyOS obviously allows users to run apps built for Google’s operating system, but on the other hand, devices pre-loaded with this operating system wouldn’t come equipped with any Google service like Gmail or Google Maps.
Huawei has worked hard to address this shortcoming of its platform, so the company has been insisting on developers to bring their apps to its very own app store. While many have already joined Huawei’s platform, the lack of Google apps continues to be a major drawback, and the whole thing has already taken its toll globally.
Huawei’s market share in the smartphone business has declined substantially in the last quarters, pretty much as a result of the sanctions the company received in the United States.
It remains to be seen if HarmonyOS is able to replace the full version of Android and Google services in the long term, but we’ll finally hear more about the OS in just a few days.
