21st May 2019

Huawei Preps for a Future Without Official Access to Android

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By PC Mag

Can an alternative OS salvage Huawei's smartphone business?

On Tuesday, the Chinese smartphone maker said it would consider using a Huawei-made operating system or another substitute in the event the company loses its Android license due to the US blacklisting Huawei from the country's suppliers.

"I think an alternative option will naturally come out," Huawei EU representative Abraham Liu told journalists in Brussels. "It's either from Huawei or [someone] else." What Huawei's OS actually looks like remains a mystery. But the company has been developing the software for "some time," according to Liu.

And according another Huawei exec—Richard Yu, CEO of its business consumer group—the Huawei-made operating system could debut as soon as this fall but might not arrive until spring 2020 at the latest. The OS will work with smartphones, PCs, tablets, TVs, cars, and wearables, and also be compatible with Android apps, Yu reportedly told journalists in a private WeChat discussion. Huawei still prefers to use Android or Windows, though.

Will Anyone Want a Huawei OS?

The chance of Huawei's homegrown OS enticing actual buyers is another question. The company currently sells about half of its smartphones in China, where access to foreign internet services from Google, Twitter and Facebook are banned. So offering a mobile OS in China without YouTube or the Google Play Store actually represents the status quo.

The bigger challenge is making the homegrown OS viable outside China. Huawei currently ranks as the second largest smartphone vendor in the world, in large part because the company's phones are popular in Europe and the Middle East, said Vincent Thielke, a smartphone analyst at research firm Canalys.

"For a lot of consumers who buy an Android device, the Google services are quite important," he added.

To address markets outside of China, it's possible Huawei might simply stick with Android. The Trump trade ban doesn't actually ban the Chinese vendor from using the open-source version of Android; it merely restricts Google from licensing company services such as Google Play, YouTube, and Google Maps to Huawei.

As a result, Huawei would have to supply its own app store on Android smartphones, which it appears to be doing. According to Bloomberg, the company has been pitching app makers in a bid to bring 50 million Europeans to the platform by the end of 2018.

Still, Huawei's attempts to counter the US blacklist could come up short. The company is facing plenty of competition from other Chinese vendors also eager to expand across the world. "Oppo, Xiaomi, in particular, I think they could benefit from all this," Thielke said. "Other vendors don't have their businesses muddied in IT infrastructure."

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