This article comes from WeChat WeChat official account "national business daily".
Recently, social media such as friends circle were screened by a short film "Wukong".
The film tells the story that the hero, a little boy, loves the Monkey King since he was a child and wants to go to the cinema in the city to see "Make a scene in Heaven". The core of the film focuses on the juvenile spirit of "I don’t know much about heaven".
N+ Finance understands that although this short film did not directly reveal too much information about Huawei itself, it still caused a lot of interpretations, which is undoubtedly the expectation of HarmonyOS system and even Huawei.
Image source: Every photo by reporter Liu Ling
On May 21st, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, revealed:"As soon as this fall, at the latest next spring, Huawei’s own OS will probably be available.. "
In fact, the domestic mobile operating system has been tried by many manufacturers before. The giants include Baidu (BIDU.US) cloud OS and Tencent (00700)TOS, and the entrepreneurial team once had a little heart OS and Le Frog OS. And the most brilliant achievement belongs to Ali:
At the end of 2015,BABA.US) YunOS surpassed WP to become the third largest mobile operating system in China with a market share of 7.1%., second only to Android and iOS.
Now, times have changed, and Huawei HarmonyOS, burdened with the expectations of Chinese people, can make a scene like Wukong mentioned in the promotional film and fight its way out in the rivers and lakes of the mobile phone operating system?
In the short film Wukong, the little boy, obsessed with the Monkey King, is bent on going to see the Monkey King’s movie in the big city where "there is only one way to go over the back mountain and two more mountains, and it takes one night by car". He goes out alone, encounters a series of "adventures" and finally arrives at his destination in rags.
Some netizens commented that the spirit of the little boy and the spirit of Wukong are in the same strain, and the shadow can also be seen in Huawei.
Huawei officially released the film on May 23rd.
At the same time, Huawei announced that its "spare tire" had turned positive, and its self-developed Hisilicon chip and self-developed operating system "HarmonyOS" attracted much attention. This short film also triggered speculation about HarmonyOS system.
Huawei rarely makes statements to confirm or completely deny the rumors of HarmonyOS system. Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei, said in an interview with national business daily on May 21st:
“We can do the operating system, but it is not necessarily a substitute for others.Because we also need it in artificial intelligence and the Internet of Everything, but I don’t know exactly which ones are used and which ones aren’t. "
At the same time, he did not disclose whether HarmonyOS has been used in a small scale within Huawei.
Compared with Huawei’s low profile, "HarmonyOS" system keeps making new progress. On May 24th,The website of China National Intellectual Property Administration Trademark Office shows that Huawei has applied for the "Huawei HarmonyOS" trademark.. The application date is August 24, 2018, the registration announcement date is May 14, 2019, and the exclusive permission period is from May 14, 2019 to May 13, 2029.
Then, on May 29th, it was reported that a few days ago, Huawei submitted a trademark application for "HUAWEI ARK OS" to the European Intellectual Property Office, and "ARK" means "Ark" in English.
At the beginning of June, it was reported from the media that Huawei has started to test the mobile phones that will be equipped with HarmonyOS system, and the number of mobile phones in the test stage has reached one million. At the same time, Huawei also released the interface picture of HarmonyOS system, which is very similar to the current Huawei EMUI. The function arrangement, status bar, font layout and key color matching are almost identical.
On June 3rd, Huawei told N+ Finance that "we haven’t heard of it at all, so we can’t comment" on the rumor of testing HarmonyOS system on 1 million mobile phones.
It is understood that Huawei has been planning its own operating system "HarmonyOS" since 2012, aiming to become a substitute for Google’s Android system.
As for HarmonyOS, it is reported that the operating system has been greatly optimized for Linux (open source) and has been used in Huawei mobile phones (security part).
Combined with such news, Huawei’s HarmonyOS system comes to the fore. Tim Watkins, vice president of Huawei’s Western European market, has previously confirmed to the media that Huawei has been developing an operating system and will launch it soon.
Operating system is the soul of smart phone. As far as the current market is concerned, operating systems are mainly divided into two schools.They are Apple’s iOS system and Google’s Android system, which have a market share of 99%.
Since Apple’s iOS system is only for its own use and not open to other mobile phone manufacturers, Android system has become the only choice for many mobile phone manufacturers in China. Huawei’s EMUI system, Xiaomi’s MIUI system and vivo’s Fun touch OS system are all deeply developed based on Android system.
Wei Yongming, CEO of Feiman Software, wrote an article in 2012, "Why does Huawei Alibaba have to engage in an" independent "operating system? What is the soul of the operating system? ",the article said that taking Android as an example, the operating system open source license constraint is very loose, but:
"Google has certainly accumulated a large number of patents in the process of developing Android, especially Dalvik virtual machine and Java class library, and these patents are above the copyright and license of the software. In other words, if you derive a branch from the existing Android,If you want to sell the software running this derivative version of Android on your mobile phone, Google can immediately take out a patent stick to limit you."
According to Yu Chengdong’s description of HarmonyOS system, all Huawei mobile phones will be equipped with self-developed OS system in the future.Huawei’s self-developed operating system has opened up electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, cars and tablets, and has been able to support a new software ecosystem for Huawei.
However, at present, the operating system has been occupied by Android and iOS. In order to occupy a place in Huawei’s HarmonyOS system, the first thing to be solved is the problem of software compatibility. After all, no company will adapt software for a system that is not used by many people.
In the research report "From Operating System to Chip-Counting is still stuck in the neck field (I)" released by China Merchants Securities in August 2018, it is pointed out that compared with foreign countries, the technical development of operating system is not a difficulty, nor is it a core factor restricting the development of domestic operating systems.
"The main reason why it can’t occupy a place in the market is that the domestic operating system lacks the ecological environment for high-quality applications."
At present, there are some doubts about the expansion of Huawei’s HarmonyOS system. Before Huawei’s "HarmonyOS", other domestic manufacturers tried to develop their own operating systems, but they didn’t really grow up in the end.
For example, Alibaba Yun OS once occupied 7% of the domestic mobile phone operating system market share from 2014 to 2015, which was also the "peak moment" of the domestic mobile phone system, but then the market share declined rapidly.
Yesterday, Xiang Ligang, the founder of Feixiang.com, expressed another view to N+ Finance. In his view,Huawei has shipped 200 million mobile phones this year, and Apple also has 200 million mobile phones. "Apple’s ecology can be done. Why can’t Huawei be an ecology?"
He said that the outside world’s doubts about Huawei HarmonyOS are mainly at two levels. First, many operating systems, including Windows, have not been done; Second, many people may not develop applications for Huawei systems.
Xiang Ligang said that Windows appeared earlier than Android, and then Android overtook it. The reason why it is not done well is becauseWindows is unfriendly to developers, with poor interface experience and poor interaction ability.
"Windows also charges mobile phone manufacturers, and of course it doesn’t do well. Huawei certainly does not have the problem of charging for its own use.Huawei’s understanding of the operating system has been very profound. And made a new compiler, which is compatible with Android applications.So it’s easy to build HarmonyOS, and I don’t think there is any problem. "
"Many people may not support Huawei’s application.But if Huawei sells hundreds of millions of mobile phones a year, why not apply it?If these applications are very difficult to do, then the current applications are Android, and they can be compatible by running the compiler once. "Xiang Ligang said.
Sun yanbiao, dean of the first mobile phone research institute, believes that the operating system mainly depends on the construction of ecology, and it takes time to build ecology. It took Apple four or five years to build its own ecology, and Android also took four or five years.Under the existing operating system, it will take two to three years for HarmonyOS to do it, and this time is inevitable.
"Why should Internet APP developers develop corresponding apps? This needs to be based on a large user base. What the new ecology often lacks most is the user group. Only by having a large user group can we make a profit, which is essentially a problem of Internet effect. In addition, the ecology that Huawei HarmonyOS needs to build is not only China, but also overseas, so it takes time. "
Sun Yanbiao emphasized that Huawei’s HarmonyOS system could not build a strong ecosystem in a short time, and the construction of this ecosystem was a slow process. "At that time, when Android was going to be an ecosystem, almost all mobile phones except Apple used Android’s operating system, but even in this case, it took almost four years for Android to sprout to rival Apple’s operating system."
Xiang Ligang also told reporters that after the release of the HarmonyOS system, it will change the market structure of global operating systems. HarmonyOS system appears after Android and Windows, and its understanding of operating systems is definitely deeper than that of Android.
"Huawei itself said that if you run it with a compiler, you can improve the efficiency by 60%. Android needs a virtualizer, and it doesn’t start the compiler from the bottom at all, while the HarmonyOS system starts compiling from the bottom, and the efficiency is definitely better than Android. " Xiang Ligang said.
In addition to Huawei, new news has also come from the operating system field.
On May 25th, the media revealed that KaiOS Technologies, the manufacturer of the third largest mobile phone operating system in the world, had received a $50 million financing in Series B..
In addition, ZTE is also developing a mobile phone operating system based on independent intellectual property rights. The industry believes that the operating system may show a diversified trend and is expected to usher in a new round of competition.
The latest news is that on May 31st, it was reported that Mate 20 Pro, which was previously removed by Google, was back, and it continued to support the latest Android Q Beta.
Earlier, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that it would stop some cooperation with Huawei and erase the name of Huawei Mate 20 Pro on the Android Q Beta page.