Huawei is working on its own mobile OS in case things sour with Google | Hacker News Reader

Huawei is working on its own mobile OS in case things sour with Google

theverge.com

37 pointsjonbaer38 comments

Currently working in this company, I guarantee you Huawei is working on its own version of everything. Any tool we use is always considered as something we should aim to replace with a version of our own.

A custom OS does not suprise me in the slightest, considering there are custom ARMv8 CPU's in development as well

This just seems like a smart call. Some of the largest companies have made the mistake of making themselves dependent on another company for their business model, which can leave them in a bad place if the relationship sours or the platform changes. The old example of course, is Facebook games, where companies like Zynga pretty much exist or don't at the whims of Facebook's policies.

Samsung of course has Tizen as a fallback. I wonder how many other manufacturers may have fallback plans in this regard. Because if Android goes away, the only other slightly popular OS they can license for their own devices is Windows, which of course won't let them customize the platform as much.

Other manufacturers can and should use Tizen as well. It is open source after all.

But then someone like Huawei just puts themselves in the predicament of being subject to Samsung's whims. Android is allegedly open source too, but the reality is, the platform's creator decides it's development direction, and if you want the apps to work, you have to follow it.

I wish some good manufacturer stepped in and went the direction Nokia was going with Maemo, sans the stupid marketing decisions.

Also, with ChromeOS being able to run Android applications soon, it might be easier to get a new OS populated with decent software before native things get some traction.

Pretty much every Android OEM has a plan B. It would kinda stupid not to. Samsung has proudly shown off Tizen and even releases products with it. Actually, its the fourth largest mobile in term of market share. Sailfish is reportedly used internally in several companies as well.

The more the merrier. I would love to see Android be a Nexus-only product where there's a high level of quality, fast updates, and years of security/platform updates opposed to the excessively skinned Android phones that maybe get one major update in their lifetime and then get tossed into the landfill.

edit: I should note Tizen isn't a Samsung product, they are just one of its biggest users and contributors. Its an open source OS managed by the Linux foundation.

>Pretty much every Android OEM has a plan B. It would kinda stupid not to.

I am genuinely not capable of understanding this logic.google is not a small company and they are not going to destroy Android with these kind of stupid decisions.

So why Samsung and etc does spend billions on new softwares when they can simply fork Android (in most extreme situations to respond to Google, just like what Amazon did).

The concern is not that Android "goes away", but that google enslaves the hardware companies like good old MS of yore enslaved the PS clone makers.

That ship has sailed. Learn how to prosper in that role or do something else. If you think you can do an OS, go for it. I would like to see a third successful mobile OS.

>If you think you can do an OS, go for it.

It's not about competing with Android. It's about bargaining power. If you depend on Google, they can dictate any terms they like. Having an alternative to Android, even a crappy one, sets an upper limit to how hard Google can screw you over.

Google might not kill Android outright, but there are huge parts of the API that depend on their proprietary software. So far they haven't abused that power much. If they decide to change the their terms, you want to have an alternative that's ready to ship in under a year.

Have you ever seen Tizen APIs?

They already went through Meego, BADA OS, and now EFL reboots.

I wouldn't bother to code for it, not even as an hobby.

And I do code as an hobby for Android and WP.

Is this an Asian thing? Like Juche?

It's a "we have no idea when these companies OR our own government might suddenly screw us out of the software we need to sell our hardware, due to changing geopolitical winds" thing. A bit like avoiding your whole startup being only a third-party Facebook or Twitter developer. :)

Or when some foreign government might suddenly screw you hard:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-07/chinas-hua...

The US has no problem purchasing foreign telecom gear from foreign companies - Ericsson(Swedish) and Alcatel/Lucent(French), just Huawei. Selective economic protectionism. Free market what?

Hopefully it's better than their own calendar app they install on their Android phones.

My sister was missing the "task" view in the calendar app. Found out that this is Huawei's abysmal own calender - it worked in the Google calendar.

A friend of mine (using a Huawei Android phone too) had problems to view multiple calendars at once. The solution was to install Google calendar on the phone.

So I'm not too thrilled with their Android apps.

It's not great that the icon is the exact same for the native and the google calendar app.

Yes - this doesn't help at all.

The main issue here is that a bunch of multi-billion businesses are dependent on a company that has its own agenda. Google doesn't care about Huawei or Samsung or Sony. If dropping Android and joining Windows Phone camp could somehow improve their ad revenue and data gathering they would probably do it.

So while I don't think Huawei will get anywhere with their OS. They (and Samsung) are trying to send a message to Google: act like a real partner or we are out.

> So while I don't think Huawei will get anywhere with their OS. They (and Samsung) are trying to send a message to Google: act like a real partner or we are out.

Well I agree with the first sentence, but the second? They really don't have that much leverage; I highly doubt that's anywhere near the message they are trying to send. You seem to imply Google should feel threatened by these moves, which I imagine is far from the case.

Samsung is allegedly doing the same thing with Tizen: http://9to5google.com/2016/06/13/report-claims-that-samsung-...

I don't think this is likely to happen, it would destroy both Samsung's and Huawei's markets in the West. Perhaps Korean and Chinese consumers might switch to the new platforms but I can't see those of us in the Americas and Europe giving up our Google services.

I mean, you can buy a Tizen phone from Samsung right now:

http://www.samsung.com/in/consumer/mobile-devices/smartphone...

From native point of Tizen already had two reboots.

First it was based on Meego APIs, then it got the C++ dialect from BADA OS (very similar to Symbian) and now they rebooted it again using EFL + C, but adding another C++ API in the process.

Native is not always open to everyone, for example for TVs app developers can only use WebApps and need to become a partner for native code.

So I doubt that Tizen will ever get an app eco-system that people will bother to use.

So who do I distrust less, Google, who is shamelessly harvesting all kinds of data just because they can, or a company with history of malware/spyware allegations?

> or a company with history of malware/spyware allegations

I'm not familiar with Huawaei, what's the story behind this?

There were a few stories a while back, although IMO they were fairly light on details and data to back up their claims: http://au.idigitaltimes.com/malware-found-pre-installed-xiao...

More generally however, a lot of tech manufactured in China has concern around it. Numerous western govt's have blacklisted the use of anything Chinese-produced over fears of espionage and general quality. A good example is the 'backdoors' that have shown up in Lenovo computers post-acquisition.

I think there may be a little confusion between the the fact that Huawei makes networking gear which is blacklisted with a number of western govt's, with their mobile offerings - and several reports of 'malware' haven't helped muddy the waters.

That said I wouldn't use a Huawei phone.

Edit: here's the report regarding Malware: https://public.gdatasoftware.com/Presse/Publikationen/Malwar...

It got a ton of upvotes on HN much to my confusion, given that the PDF reads like a marketing release trying to sell mobile AV (there's a whole side-topic of conversation there). Furthermore, the click-bait title highlights Lenovo, Huawei, etc when the actual report only outlines 3 never-heard-of-before vendors and mentions they 'suspect' the other vendors of distributing infected phones.

Again, I would never own a Chinese-designed phone, but I think it's worth verifying claims.

This probably depends on where you live...

The source article: https://www.theinformation.com/how-a-former-apple-designer-i...

If Huawei's history is any indication they're probably just taking the android code, and doing a find and replace.

There are so many innovations that can be done in the world (and to Android itself as well), but another new OS is not one that would make sense (maybe a HTML5+JS based, but there are already open source OSs based on that). Even Microsoft has a hard time getting into the Mobile OS market. Anyways, good luck to Huawei (and I wish they would try to beat Samsung in the high-end the mobile market).

The choices are pretty grim:

The only OS other than iOS and Android that has a managed language runtime is Windows. It's not a bad phone OS. But it is US-made and if you are Chinese, you don't want NSA inside.

Possibly the best alternative is to do an OS derived from AOSP. But only Amazon has done a good job with this, building a really polished commercial product with a complete (for their purposes of media consumption) ecosystem.

Then there is Sailfish. The main problem with Sailfish is that C++/Qt/Linux is not a competitive app environment compared with Swift on iOS or Android's Java-like runtime.

Web app runtimes on Tizen and other contenders taking this route have also proven to be underdeveloped, slow, and too under-resourced to get them past general problems with web apps, framework consensus, etc.

Tizen is also a very schizophrenic OS.

First they ditched the API inherited from Meego by their own BADA flavored ones with that Symbian C++ touch, and recently they ditched those again by C + EFL with another new C++ one to avoid losing C++ developers.

Also the native APIs aren't available everywhere where Tizen runs, for example on TVs only the Web app runtime is available to all developers. For native one needs to pay extra.

So besides going back to stone age C style APIs, their continuous change of direction doesn't inspire any confidence to invest into the platform.

For any partnership with billions at stake, I would consider such experiments as insurance. It's a good thing that Huawei is being proactive in this regards. Although I do wonder why don't they build it on AOSP instead of building something from scratch.

I would love to see Creative Labs return to the scene with Plaszma OS, which they were doing before iOS and Android took all the ice cream.

So many alternative ways to use Linux to provide an awesome user experience ..

EMUI is terrible, if only they would make it easy to run stock Android.

Yep. It shows that Huawei, at least those UI developers, fundamentally do not understand how OSes work. EMUI, when you invoke the switch window function, has a single button to kill all running processes (or activities or whatever Android calls them). Hitting it by accident is easy. And once you do so, the UI proclaims with glee how much memory it freed up. Even when, on my phone, I've never seen free mem under 800MB.

Are there any non-US companies that do well in creating UIs?

After my disappointing experience with the Nexus 6P, I can't imagine a situation where I would roll the dice with Huawei hardware, let alone software.

Can you elaborate? I'm interested on the Nexus 6P.

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