14 DAY TRIAL // The US restrictions that banned Huawei from using technology belonging to American firms makes the Chinese company a little bit more fair-play when it comes to its relationship with rivals.
While Huawei mocked Apple on several occasions, claiming its devices are so much better that iPhones, the founder of the company has recently admitted that buying iPhones is something that even he does every once in a while.
“iPhone has a good ecosystem and when my family are abroad, I still buy them iPhones,” CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei said on Chinese state TV as per SCMP.
Zhengfei emphasized this has nothing to do with the love for Huawei, explaining that even if you are a supporter of the company, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to purchase all the smartphones it makes.
“One can’t narrowly think love for Huawei should mean loving Huawei phones,” he said.
The love for Huawei
And this is perfectly true. While nationalists in China are now giving up on their iPhones to purchase Huawei models as a form of protest following the recent US restrictions, some are likely to return once the scandal comes to an end.
Zhengfei, however, isn’t the only member of the family that is looking at Apple products when leaving the country. In late 2018, his daughter Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada, and authorities seized all the devices she was carrying, including an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook. While many say Meng was just using them to see what rivals were up to, others believe the Huawei CFO was actually truly committed to the Apple ecosystem.
In the meantime, however, Huawei is hard at work on getting its in-house operating system ready for launch. This OS would replace Google and Windows, and by the looks of things, the hardest thing for Huawei will be to build this rich ecosystem that it loves so much about the iPhone. Huawei will launch this OS with its own app store, albeit it’ll be a challenge to convince all devs to bring their apps here.