There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
Some countries went with SmartCards that you can use on any platform that can communicate with a card reader basically.
HarmonyOS
In theory you could have something produced by a country other countries might be willing to trust, but the number of countries that are both trustworthy and large enough to sustain a globally-viable platform is practically the empty set at this point.
Which means the thing it calls for is something open source, since that both allows contributions from multiple countries and solves the trust issue by leaving no single entity in control of it.
So giving your data to the Chinese government, while not a great solution, may still be preferable over giving it to the U.S. for someone in the EU given the closer relationship between EU governments and the U.S. than EU governments and the Chinese government.
Of course, this may be the opposite of what you want from a national perspective.
If the USA were to ever weaken into irrelevance then yes messing with foreign HarmonyOS users might have some possibility that can’t be easily dismissed.
As long as the USA doesn’t become completely toothless then the incentives would point in the opposite… as long as Huawei behave scrupulously they are nearly guaranteed to win and dethrone the incumbents for most of the world.
Moreover, everybody knows how the enshittification cycle works at this point. They don't openly betray you when they have 0.3% market share, they just fit you for a noose that gets tighter as their market power increases. But because everybody now expects that to happen, who is going to use it to begin with if it's not open source and correspondingly resistant to rug pulls?
I dont see how US decisions on Huawei are relevant to the prospects of HarmonyOS in the future, when that’s already been priced in?
In other words China doesn't have to be trustworthy as long as the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.