14 DAY TRIAL // Huawei has recently registered a trademark for its upcoming operating system supposed to replace Android and Windows on its own devices.
Called Hongmeng, the operating system showed up in the documents of the Trademark Office of China’s National Intellectual Property Administration earlier this month, confirming that Huawei is working at full speed on getting it ready for launch.
As per CGTN, the application was submitted on August 24, 2018, and the Hongmeng trademark is valid between May 14, 2019, and May 13, 2029.
Huawei trying to register the Hongmeng trademark in the summer of 2018 shows that the company indeed expected a potential ban that would restrict the use of Android and Windows. Huawei officials said on several occasions they were working on an in-house operating system to replace Windows and Android, but the company only accelerated the development of this project once the United States government set new restrictions over its licensing deals with American companies.
Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump signed an order banning Huawei from receiving any products from companies based in the United States, including here Google and Microsoft, both of which provide the Chinese tech giant with operating systems for its devices.
Huawei’s smartphones run Android, whereas the laptops that it sells worldwide are powered by Windows.
Universal operating system
Hongmeng is thus supposed to replace both of them, and according to the information we received so far, is developed as a universal platform that would run on both smartphones and tablets. This idea isn’t new, as Microsoft itself tried to make Windows 10 an operating system for all categories of devices, and Huawei hopes it can make this happen with Hongmeng.
According to Huawei officials, Hongmeng is projected to launch in China as soon as this year, while the international debut should take place in 2020.
The bigger challenge for Huawei, however, isn’t to develop an operating system, but to create the app ecosystem that would support its adoption. And Huawei officials are fully aware of this.
“It's not a difficult task to come up with a new OS, but it's difficult to build up an ecosystem for that,” Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei was quoted as saying by the cited source.
Hongmeng will come with Huawei’s own App Gallery pre-installed, so users would have access to select apps already available in this app store. However, it’ll be a challenge for the company to expand it in order to become a worthy alternative to Google Play Store.