Owners of Huawei devices may soon find themselves faced with a difficult choice: stick with the Android operating system that came with the devices when they were purchased, or install an update that will replace it with the company’s new operating system, HarmonyOS, a senior company spokesman hinted. Last week.
The speech was delivered by the President of the Software Department at Wavi’s Consumer Division, Wang Chenglu, at a conference entitled “Everything is Growing Up Again,” organized by the Sina Corporation, known in the West mainly for its social network, Weibo.
According to Chenglu, by the end of 2021 the company hopes that at least 200 million devices made by it – a number that represents its annual sales in the past year – will run its new operating system instead of Google’s Android . Most commentators understood that the intention was not that the company hopes to sell a similar number of devices running its operating system this year, but that it intends to update the devices it sold in 2020, and perhaps even in 2019, to the new system, thus greatly increasing the number of users in its first year. In the market.
However, this interpretation is not exactly consistent with a report by an Indian YouTuber, who claimed about a week and a half ago that the P50, the company’s next flagship device, will be sold worldwide with both operating systems, so users can choose whether to purchase it with Android or HarmonyOS.
In an interesting twist, Chenglo argued in his speech that the development of Wavi’s operating system was not originally intended to circumvent the US boycott, and even began long before that boycott – in May 2016, even before the election of the boycott initiator, Donald Trump, as US president. The company’s original goal was to create a system that would more efficiently take advantage of the fact that all of our devices are now connected to the network, and through it to each other.
“This is not a copy of Android, but a uniform operating system that is truly adapted to the ‘Internet of Things’ era. This operating system is different from Android and iOS, which are based solely on phones,” he said, adding that HarmonyOS could run on any device. And run any app that will be available for it on any device, from a watch to a car. This is while in competing systems the developers need to create a separate app for each device type.
