Hongmeng is one step closer to replacing Apple's iOS

Author: Huang Yu

Editor: Zhou Zhiyu

Six months ago, taking advantage of the momentum of the return of 5G smartphones, Huawei officially announced its determination to separate from Android with the HarmonyOS. As the ecosystem grows, HarmonyOS is getting closer to commercial use, and attracting more developers and expanding the ecosystem has become a key focus for Huawei.

Recently, Huawei announced that over 4000 applications have joined the HarmonyOS ecosystem. This growth rate is very rapid. Compared to the initial 200 software vendors that joined HarmonyOS native application development at the beginning of the year, the number has increased by 20 times in just two months.

Zhuyonggang, President of Huawei's Terminal Cloud, previously stated at the HarmonyOS ecosystem launch event earlier this year that the first phase of the HarmonyOS ecosystem goals has been achieved, with 200 top apps already joining the native ecosystem. The goal for the second phase is to cover 5000 top apps by mid-2024. The next phase aims for 500,000 apps.

At the current rate, HarmonyOS is expected to achieve the second phase goal ahead of schedule, aiming to officially launch "pure HarmonyOS" for commercial use in the fourth quarter of this year. At the same time, HarmonyOS also has the strength to surpass Apple's iOS.

Currently, the number of devices connected to HarmonyOS has exceeded 800 million. Research firm TechInsights even predicts that by 2024, HarmonyOS will replace Apple's iOS as the second largest smartphone operating system in China.

As is well known, the key to the success of an operating system lies in its ecosystem. For HarmonyOS to completely separate from Android, it must attract a sufficient number of developers to join.

According to Huawei, the HarmonyOS ecosystem has already covered multiple vertical industries, including convenient living, travel and tourism, financial management, social news, productivity tools, audio-visual entertainment, games, and other areas with top applications.

Among them, top applications such as Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, iQIYI, Ximalaya, WPS Office, China Merchants Bank, Postal Savings Bank, etc., have completed the development of the beta version and are continuously refining their products.

However, even under the spotlight, there are shadows. Among the top applications cooperating with HarmonyOS, the presence of two national-level social applications, WeChat and Douyin, has not yet emerged. At the HarmonyOS ecosystem launch event earlier this year, there was also no sign of Tencent and ByteDance.

In March, there were reports that negotiations between the WeChat team and the Tencent team were not going smoothly. Both parties have not responded publicly to this.

Joining the HarmonyOS ecosystem is already a trend driven by the overall situation. Whether from the perspective of the number of HarmonyOS devices or policy guidance, Tencent and ByteDance's compromise may just be a matter of time.

The development of HarmonyOS native applications has received strong support from local governments. In early March this year, Shenzhen issued an action plan to support the development of HarmonyOS native applications, proposing to build Shenzhen into a source and aggregation area for HarmonyOS native application software ecosystem. Recently, the country's first HarmonyOS ecosystem innovation center has also been unveiled in Shenzhen Not only Shenzhen, but also many provinces and cities have initiated the development of local government and people's livelihood applications, vertical domain applications, and local media platform's HarmonyOS native applications. For example, Shanghai's people's livelihood service super app "随申办" and Zhejiang's "浙里办" app, as well as various people's livelihood, media, automotive, and lifestyle applications from provinces and cities such as Sichuan, Guangxi, Shandong, Hebei, Anhui, have all joined the "HarmonyOS fleet".

Perhaps as Huawei's Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu said, the momentum of the HarmonyOS ecosystem has already taken shape.

2024 is the year when the native HarmonyOS ecosystem begins. Richard Yu has mentioned that Huawei will accelerate the development of various native HarmonyOS applications this year, focusing on winning the two most challenging battles of technology foundation and third-party ecosystem.

A mature operating system needs a solid foundation, a thriving ecosystem, and an ultimate experience, all of which are indispensable. This will determine whether HarmonyOS can eventually become a domestically produced mobile phone operating system on par with Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

As Huawei's consumer business regains more market share, the "pure HarmonyOS" will be officially commercialized. 2024 may be the first year of commercialization for HarmonyOS