They need to make sure they understand this has nothing to do with “specs”, which is how so many people look at it. They need to understand it is about solving people’s problems. And anticipating and solving probable future problems. In a way that is natural to the customer.
Exactly! And it is that for which Apple is known. Steve embedded that in the company: satisfying the needs of the customer is what drives technology -- not the other way around:
"You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology..."
"What incredible benefits can we give to the customer..."
Can any other company match Apple in that regard? While I hope so, I also doubt it.
Regardless, that is the core that drove the great American Industrial age of a century ago: great organizations doing great things. US Steel was created when a railroad executive told his assistant (Andrew Carnegie) that he needed a bridge across the Mississippi River because it was blocking his railroad. It didn't start with steel. But it ended with cars, bridges and sky scrapers.
Likewise, as great a technician as Woz was, it was Steve's vision of what that technology could do for the customer that made it work.
Here, Steve describes his ideas on what drives Apple:
They use the Android platform, right? I would have thought they'd need to start right there. In order to compete fully with Apple and match the user experience they probably ought to be entirely in control of their own os's.
Exactly! Without that (their own OS & ecosystem) they simply enter the world of PC manufacturers competing against each other while all are producing essentially the same product: A Windows PC.
It is why PCs have become a commodity like washing machines.
They use the Android platform, right? I would have thought they'd need to start right there. In order to compete fully with Apple and match the user experience they probably ought to be entirely in control of their own os's.
Exactly! Without that (their own OS & ecosystem) they simply enter the world of PC manufacturers competing against each other while all are producing essentially the same product: A Windows PC.
It is why PCs have become a commodity like washing machines.
Everyone has a washing machine. Does everyone have a Mac? I'd say I'd rather be in the business of selling a really good washing machine.
The user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
The CEO of Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi has announced an intention to compete "fully" with Apple's iPhone, and described it as "a war of life and death."
Good luck to them. Though it would be nice to see more competition and less copying.
They use the Android platform, right? I would have thought they'd need to start right there. In order to compete fully with Apple and match the user experience they probably ought to be entirely in control of their own os's.
Exactly! Without that (their own OS & ecosystem) they simply enter the world of PC manufacturers competing against each other while all are producing essentially the same product: A Windows PC.
It is why PCs have become a commodity like washing machines.
Everyone has a washing machine. Does everyone have a Mac? I'd say I'd rather be in the business of selling a really good washing machine.
The user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
WithThe user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
The article is in fact a quite flattering piece but it's not about flattery but R&D.
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
They use the Android platform, right? I would have thought they'd need to start right there. In order to compete fully with Apple and match the user experience they probably ought to be entirely in control of their own os's.
Exactly! Without that (their own OS & ecosystem) they simply enter the world of PC manufacturers competing against each other while all are producing essentially the same product: A Windows PC.
It is why PCs have become a commodity like washing machines.
Everyone has a washing machine. Does everyone have a Mac? I'd say I'd rather be in the business of selling a really good washing machine.
That was the point: Apple separated itself from the Windows PC crowd building commodities by using their own OS and ecosystem...
Does everyone have a Mac? No
Does everyone have a PC? Pretty much. The few that don't likely have a Mac
What they don't understand is that apple has a things in their favor. Apple own and develop their Operating Systems. They design and they can tightly integrate their OS into their hardware and they can make their devices more sable and make then work well together, hence an over better ecosystem. Also, they have a loyal user install base. I am one of them
Apple does have a weak point in its ecosystem. Apple is historically weak in content. For example, gaming program and applications in general. Yahoo and Google have worked in content for a long time. Apple in recently years have begun to work on content provision.
WithThe user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
The article is in fact a quite flattering piece but it's not about flattery but R&D.
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
Given that this the OP is wrt smnartphones, its safe to state that Harmony OS isn't available outside of China. That isn't to imply that someone outside of China hasn't used it.
What they don't understand is that apple has a things in their favor. Apple own and develop their Operating Systems. They design and they can tightly integrate their OS into their hardware and they can make their devices more sable and make then work well together, hence an over better ecosystem. Also, they have a loyal user install base. I am one of them
Yep!
Weirdly, for a company that started out trying to challenge IBM, they ended up adopting some of the stuff that made that a great company.
I ran financial systems for multiple companies on IBM mainframes. And, I built a walled garden around them so only I could change how they worked. The result was: a set of rock solid, bullet proof systems that were not only tightly integrated but worked well with each other.
I got complaints from the workers of those systems -- but never, ever from their bosses. The bosses only wanted the checks to go out on time -- and that's what they got.
Apple has established a similar situation: a set of rock solid, bullet proof systems that work well together and: together are stronger than any of them are separately. But, the lower level workers complain that they can't tinker with it.
WithThe user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
The article is in fact a quite flattering piece but it's not about flattery but R&D.
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
Given that this the OP is wrt smnartphones, its safe to state that Harmony OS isn't available outside of China. That isn't to imply that someone outside of China hasn't used it.
Except that Huawei established a 1+8+n strategy years ago that straddles EMUI and HarmonyOS and now many of the core parts of HarmonyOS are said to be baked into EMUI 12 making those phones de facto HarmonyOS handsets. The user experience is almost identical on both systems.
WithThe user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
The article is in fact a quite flattering piece but it's not about flattery but R&D.
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
Given that this the OP is wrt smnartphones, its safe to state that Harmony OS isn't available outside of China. That isn't to imply that someone outside of China hasn't used it.
Except that Huawei established a 1+8+n strategy years ago that straddles EMUI and HarmonyOS and now many of the core parts of HarmonyOS are said to be baked into EMUI 12 making those phones de facto HarmonyOS handsets. The user experience is almost identical on both systems.
Great for them that they finally delivered the production release of EMUI 12, as of abut 10 days ago, so you at least, will be able to use your Honor 10; or not, since it will require the Magic 5.0 update.
WithThe user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
The article is in fact a quite flattering piece but it's not about flattery but R&D.
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
Given that this the OP is wrt smnartphones, its safe to state that Harmony OS isn't available outside of China. That isn't to imply that someone outside of China hasn't used it.
Except that Huawei established a 1+8+n strategy years ago that straddles EMUI and HarmonyOS and now many of the core parts of HarmonyOS are said to be baked into EMUI 12 making those phones de facto HarmonyOS handsets. The user experience is almost identical on both systems.
Great for them that they finally delivered the production release of EMUI 12, as of abut 10 days ago, so you at least, will be able to use your Honor 10; or not, since it will require the Magic 5.0 update.
WithThe user experience for most people is mostly based on Apple's ecosystem. For most companies it's not hard to duplicate Apple's hardware (or at least come close enough that most users wouldn't know the difference) -- Samsung does it every year. Up
But most of the user experience derives from the software and the support and interface structure surrounding the device -- no company can beat Apple as long as they're locked into Android.
The analogy is the companies producing Windows PCs. They can only set themselves apart by hardware and construction quality. But that has a very limited impact on the "user experience" -- which mostly derives from software and ecosystem.
I think Huawei would have a MUCH better chance at beating Apple's ecosystem because, as we forced them to do, they have developed their own modern OS and they spend more on R&D than Apple. But, it doesn't look like they have any intention of fighting that battle.
Huawei's "modern OS", aka Harmony OS, was after close examination by various indivisuals, just a fork of Android OS. That Huawei had intentions of a modern OS is not the same as a modern OS.
To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei's OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS "a rival to Android," and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS."
...After hours of poking around on HarmonyOS, I couldn't point to a single substantive change compared to Android. Other than a few renamed items, nothing is different. If anyone at Huawei wants to dispute this, I would welcome an example of a single thing in the emulator that is functionally or even aesthetically different from Android. If anyone wants to cry "it's just a beta!," Huawei says this OS will be shipping in commercial phones this year. There does not appear to be time to do a major overhaul from "Android" to "Not Android."
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.
I keep seeing this abut Huawei spending more on R&D than Apple, but looking in to that, it looks hard to prove, mostly because Huawei is a much more diverse, and a private company, or more correctly, a private company with extremely close ties to the CCP.
One of China's best-known and most successful corporations is Huawei Technologies. Many view Huawei with suspicion, alleging that its opaque structure conceals ties with the Chinese government and Communist Party. However, Huawei claims to be a private corporation controlled by its employees and operating in a purely commercial way. This paper demonstrates how Huawei's strange ownership structure evolved via a series of adaptive survival mechanisms within a state-dominated political and corporate ecosystem. These included profit sharing joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and officials, co-opting a Communist Party branch within the firm, and doing an end run around the PRC Company Law with 'virtual' employee shares. Placing Huawei within this Chinese ecosystem challenges simplistic accounts of top-down government or Party control over the firm. Yet the compromises that ensured Huawei's growth and protection from predation have become maladaptive within the global political ecosystem, where China is increasingly viewed as a threat.
So, I guess we can now substitute Xiaomi for Huawei in all of the above, since Huawei's fall from stardom, hastened by its obvious close ties with the CCP.
Did you read my comments in the ARS thread?
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, Ren Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment. He called it Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.” Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder. The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field. “Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves: a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
The article is in fact a quite flattering piece but it's not about flattery but R&D.
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
Given that this the OP is wrt smnartphones, its safe to state that Harmony OS isn't available outside of China. That isn't to imply that someone outside of China hasn't used it.
Except that Huawei established a 1+8+n strategy years ago that straddles EMUI and HarmonyOS and now many of the core parts of HarmonyOS are said to be baked into EMUI 12 making those phones de facto HarmonyOS handsets. The user experience is almost identical on both systems.
Great for them that they finally delivered the production release of EMUI 12, as of abut 10 days ago, so you at least, will be able to use your Honor 10; or not, since it will require the Magic 5.0 update.
Comments
He clearly had no idea about what he was saying and screwed up in areas where he shouldn't have.
Starting with the passport and identification claims. The reasons and requirements for personal identification were clearly explained in English on Huawei's developer pages. There was never any requirement to submit a passport. It was a choice between different options.
Then we have the clickbait headline that HarmonyOS was simply an Android fork.
Well, HarmonyOS was officially announced in 2019 after almost a decade of development. It shipped on low memory devices like smart screens, routers and watches and no one mentioned Android. Did no developer even take a look?
Of course they didn't need to because they knew exactly what was being used and it wasn't Android. It was using a self developed kernel.
That was spelt out during a three hour HDC keynote in September 2019. The author obviously didn't bother to sit through that. If he had, he would have learnt that Huawei said it had over 14,000 APIs and a thousand software modules that make up the backbone of the system. No Android in sight.
There was even a press tour to explain the architecture to tech outlets. He clearly had no idea about that either.
HarmonyOS is a multi kernel system with a kernel abstraction layer.
It can run on devices with a few kB of memory.
Fast forward to last year and HarmonyOS shipped on tablets and phones. The API count was now over 20,000 but compatibility with Android apps was essential. This is where the Android fork claims come in. That is not an invalid claim but it doesn't make HarmonyOS 'Android' either. EMUI has a ton of Huawei developed code in it even on its pure Android devices. The entire AI runtime being just one example.
EMUI 12 has a lot of HarmonyOS components in it.
HarmonyOS absolutely depends on its networking stack to work. It requires ultrafast interdevice connections with low latency and the entire stack was simplified and optimised to achieve this.
The distributed virtual bus design is quite complex and it's worth reading the Harmony OS security white paper because security is key in this design of distributed file systems and authentication.
He seemingly ignored the available developer tools that even I could have downloaded (albeit in beta) and used a virtual phone running off a server in China. He had to dig around documentation in Chinese and draw conclusions.
The result is a skewed viewpoint that simply ignores much of what was already known.
It seems that eventually HarmonyOS will move to one modular kernel but for the time being Android App compatibility is a logical requirement.
As far a uptake goes, it is said that HarmonyOS has been the fastest growing mobile OS in history. Currently running on over 300 million devices in little over a year.
Now rolling out on all manner of devices including cars and IoT. Midea said almost all of its devices would be compatible with HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 3 will ship this year.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently working to evaluate a new system based off OpenHarmony (the open source version of HarmonyOS).
https://newsroom.eclipse.org/news/announcements/open-source-leader-eclipse-foundation-launches-vendor-neutral-operating-system
HMS is being developed at a blistering pace.
Including Petal Search which has now become a universal search engine open to any device with a web connection.
The improvements will come thick and fast in software. The biggest current problem is access to chip manufacturing. They already have 3nm designs.
Two big claims have been made so far.
1. New Huawei chips would be released this year. No one knows exactly what.
2. That in 2023 'The King would return to the throne'. One can only assume that's a reference to phones.
So far they have invested in over 40 companies in all areas of chip design and manufacturing.
On top of that, Richard You has said they can sell 300,000 HarmonyOS equipped cars this year.
All we have to do is sit back and watch what plays out.
One thing is beyond doubt though. The genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back.
On R&D. The numbers are there. Audited. There are Huawei R&D labs all over the world and the fruits of that work are there for all to see.
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
Not all that flattering a picture of Huawei, and the result for Arikan's work; Huawei made Polar Codes a standard.
It should be noted that the U.S. basically sat out the initial 5G standards process, but that won't be the case for for 6G.
More to the point, Harmony OS 2.0 is not a worldwide release, Google Services are still in demand outside of China, and Huawei still does not have access to leading edge SOC's.
...and yet another article on Huawei Telecom security risks...
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-china-used-huawei-in-secret-australia-telecom-hack-report-2656051
HarmonyOS is already available outside China. It has been for a while now. Just not on smartphones (although it seems EMUI 12 has the core elements of HarmonyOS baked in).
https://www.huaweicentral.com/huawei-1-8-n-strategy/
https://www.huaweicentral.com/huawei-emui-12-eligible-devices/
Harmony OS 2.0 is still limited to China.
It's even on the list to get HarmonyOS later this year.