Text | Classmate Tang Chen
Independence is the first step in the new Long March of native Hongmeng.
On October 22, Huawei officially released its native Hongmeng operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT, and officially named it HarmonyOS 5. This is the largest upgrade in the history of Harmony OS. With the expansion of the list of public beta devices, it also means that the native Hongmeng has ushered in the moment for ordinary users.
For the industry and ordinary users, they prefer to call it“Pure blood Hongmeng”. The significance is that Hongmeng has got rid of the doubts of “shell Android” and no longer relies on core technologies such as foreign programming languages and operating system kernels. It only supports the applications of Hongmeng kernel and Hongmeng system. For the first time, it has realized the transformation of domestic operating systems from the underlying architecture to the application ecosystem. fully autonomous and controllable.
“We have implemented a system that unifies the ecosystem, connects multiple devices and multiple scenarios, and realizes the free flow of services and information. Hongmeng OS enables independent control of the terminal operating system.” Huawei Executive Director, Chairman of Terminal BG, Smart Car Solution BU Chairman Yu Chengdong emphasized at the press conference.
At the same time, he also said, “Today is a happy day.” The joy of this sentence is beyond words. For native Hongmeng and even Huawei, it sends a signal: Huawei has survived the headwinds in the past few years and is independent of Google Android and Apple iOS, just like Apple. Formulating your own “game rules” is the first solid step in Hongmeng’s new Long March.
Native Hongmeng, serve to the table for dinner
The reason why it is called a “Long March” is because native Hongmeng itself is a super project that is extremely difficult to develop and needs to be started from scratch. To this end, Huawei has invested tens of thousands of R&D engineers, hundreds of billions of funds, and worked closely with tens of thousands of partners and millions of developers. In April this year, at the Huawei Analyst Conference, Xu Zhijun, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said, “Building the Hongmeng native application ecosystem is the most critical thing for Huawei in 2024.”
“It took Hongmeng ten years of long march to complete the road that took European and American countries thirty years to complete,” Yu Chengdong said with emotion more than once.
When Huawei initially developed the operating system, it was not only about the Internet of Everything, but also about “preventing food shortages.” According to the Huawei Xinsheng Community, in 2012, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei had a discussion with Huawei Labs on why it should develop its own operating system. At that time, Li Jinxi, director of the terminal OS development department, asked Ren Zhengfei: “Currently in the field of terminal OS, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8 are three pillars, forming their own ecosystems. The window of opportunity for other terminal OSs is already very small. May I ask? What are the company’s expectations and requirements for terminal operating systems?”
The implication is hesitation: Why does Huawei want to make its own operating system? Ren Zhengfei’s answer was out of strategic considerations, “If these three operating systems give Huawei equal rights, then our operating system is not needed. Why can’t we use other people’s advantages? If they suddenly cut off our food, The Android system is no longer available to me, and the Windows Phone 8 system is no longer available to me. Are we stupid?”
This is Ren Zhengfei’s sense of crisis, and it is also known to outsiders as the “winter theory.” A similar statement was later proposed by Jack Ma to “repair the roof on a sunny day.” At different business stages, Huawei will launch “backup plans” to survive the “winter”. Hongmeng is one of them, and the project was established in 2015.
In 2019, Huawei was included in the “Entity List” by the United States, and Huawei’s supply chain, technology, chips, etc. were subject to a nationwide blockade. For example, in Huawei’s mobile phone business, chip supply is cut off, export controls are imposed, and Google no longer provides GMS framework services to Huawei. This has dealt a fatal blow to Huawei’s consumer terminal business. The former resulted in Huawei mobile phones being without cores for a long period of time. It had the technical advantages of 5G and could only launch 4G mobile phones. The latter resulted in Huawei mobile phones being unable to be used normally overseas and Huawei could only focus on the domestic market.
To this end, Huawei began to turn its “backup plan” into a regular business, including HiSilicon chips, Hongmeng systems, etc., which were all brought to the forefront by Huawei during this period. In 2019, Hongmeng OS was released for the first time and put into commercial use. From the initial “shell Android” to now completely self-developed, Hongmeng has experienced four major version iterations. According to official data, Hongmeng Ecosystem currently has more than 1 billion installed devices globally, with more than 110 million lines of code and 6.75 million registered developers.
For comparison, the number of active Apple devices worldwide currently exceeds 2.2 billion, and the number of Android devices worldwide exceeds 4 billion. It is not easy for Hongmeng to achieve such results in less than 1,900 days.
It is worth mentioning thatNative Hongmeng was first disclosed at the end of 2023. In less than a year, its native application ecosystem has developed rapidly. Commonly used applications that meet 99.9% of users’ time duration have all started Hongmeng native application development, covering automobiles, education, travel accommodation, There are 18 major vertical fields including financial management, business office, shopping and price comparison.
Yu Chengdong said at the press conference that more than 15,000 Hongmeng native applications and meta-services have been launched, and the native Hongmeng APP iterates rapidly, almost reaching a rate of one version a day. General office applications cover more than 38 million enterprises across the country, and thousands of internal office applications for governments and enterprises have been accelerated to go online. Since the launch of beta testing of native Hongmeng, more than 1 million suggestions and feedback have been received.
According to data from market research agency Counterpoint, in the first quarter of 2024, Hongmeng surpassed Apple iOS for the first time with a market share of 17%, becoming the second largest operating system in the Chinese smartphone market, breaking the two-way pattern between iOS and Android in the Chinese market. Earlier, Wang Chenglu, the “Father of Hongmeng” and former president of Huawei’s Consumer BG Software Department, once said, “16% is a watershed, and the ecosystem that exceeds it is basically there.”
Obviously,Pure-blood Hongmeng is already qualified to eat on the table. And under the trend of new technologies such as AI and the Internet of Everything, native Hongmeng is no longer a “replacement” for Android or iOS. It is a brand new species that has been slotted into the next generation of terminal operating systems in advance, standing alongside Android and iOS. On the same starting line.
New species are very good at fighting
As one of the first users to qualify for internal testing, I have personally experienced the surprise of native Hongmeng during use. Combining the information from the native Hongmeng Night conference, Huawei extracted five major upgrade highlights: “native exquisiteness”, “native interconnection”, “native intelligence”, “native security” and “native smoothness”, which are very effective.
In Tang Chen’s view,“Native refinement” and “native smoothness” are bonus points for native Hongmeng, which also shows that native Hongmeng has jumped from the “usable” to the “easy to use” stage. But this does not open a clear gap with its competitors, because as far as iOS and Android are concerned, the optimization and experience in these two aspects are also different. The real difference is in the three major features of “native intelligence”, “full scene” and “native security”.
The first is native intelligence. On HarmonyOS NEXT, Huawei directly deeply integrates AI with the operating system to bring new Harmony Intelligence. This makes AI functions no longer similar to mobile phone plug-ins and is imposed on the traditional application layer, allowing for more natural AI collaboration between applications.
For example, Hongmeng intelligent assistant Xiaoyi, with the support of the Pangu large model, has stronger perception and reasoning capabilities, and can realize 23 types of top scene interactions such as screen-reading dialogue and help writing, with a task success rate of more than 90%. At this point, AI mobile phones are no longer a cookie-cutter tool, but a personal assistant that understands users better and can be used by different people.
What’s impressive is that Huawei has also applied its native intelligence capabilities to the field of information accessibility. The new voice repair function helps people with language impairments recognize semantics and repair sounds, so that they can communicate face-to-face with ease.
The second is full-scenario interconnection. Thanks to distributed technology, Hongmeng system can realize mutual sharing and seamless connection of hardware capabilities between different devices, becoming the core of Huawei’s creation of a full-scenario intelligent ecosystem covering mobile phones, tablets, TVs, smart wearables, cars and other devices. , able to achieve seamless connection and collaborative work between different devices. For example, a mobile phone can use hardware resources such as a tablet’s camera and a computer’s processor to work together with multiple devices, greatly improving work efficiency and ease of use.
In an interview with CCTV, Yu Chengdong introduced that in the era of everything being connected and everything being intelligent, Hongmeng can use one operating system to solve all terminals, whether it is mobile phones, tablets, wearable watches, or industrial machinery and equipment, transportation, medical, and education industries. All types of terminals, this is a huge advantage of Hongmeng OS.
Some media commented that this combines the advantages of Apple and Android, and is also the biggest difference between pure-blood Hongmeng and Android and iOS. Some professionals also believe that Hongmeng’s system-level interconnection capabilities have expanded the usage boundaries and usage scenarios of single applications, which is also where its competitiveness lies.
The third is native security. Native Hongmeng uses a new Star Shield security architecture, which redefines the rules for applications to obtain private data through underlying technology reconstruction and experience reconstruction, truly giving privacy control to users, and ensuring privacy security from the source. On the one hand, nine types of unreasonable permissions such as reading the list of installed applications and accessing text messages are prohibited, which solves the pain point of the Android system excessively requesting user data and avoids privacy leakage from the root.
On the other hand, security access mechanisms for seven high-frequency scenarios, including gallery, camera, contacts, location, files, clipboard, and audio, are launched. For example, when uploading a photo, there is no need to authorize the entire gallery; scanning the QR code to take a photo will only give you the shooting result, not the shooting process. Users no longer need to worry about whether to authorize the application, they only need to give certain data to the application. In one sentence, the system will give you whatever you need. This is a major selling point for native Hongmeng to benchmark iOS and surpass Android in terms of security.
Objectively speaking, the significance of native Hongmeng is self-evident. CCTV continuously reported that it is not easy to build an operating system with a domestic kernel. The release of the native Hongmeng operating system marks a major breakthrough in my country’s underlying software technology capabilities. It is an important step for my country to break through the constraints of “lack of core and little soul” and European and American technology. Another iconic achievement of monopoly.
Native Hongmeng has to pass the most difficult level
But as a new species of operating system, native Hongmeng still has one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome, and that is the ecological hurdle. Huawei once defined that building Hongmeng operating system consists of three major battles. Currently, it has completed two major battles: base and experience. The third major battle is ecology. If we compare the millions of applications on iOS and Android, Hongmeng Ecosystem has just crossed the first mountain.
Tencent’s “Deep Web” evaluation: It is difficult to make technological breakthroughs, but it is even more difficult to build an ecosystem, because it is equivalent to calling on everyone to come to your site at their own expense, follow your game rules, and cover the mistakes you may make. Because “Hongmeng system is completely different from Android, which is equivalent to rewriting an App.”
Fortunately, compared to iOS and Android, HarmonyOS NEXT started in a very different market environment and received more support. This is mainly reflected in three aspects:
First, there is strong support from software and hardware manufacturers and partners. Since Huawei announced the launch of native Hongmeng, China Mobile Internet has started a round of “Great Migration”. Mainstream applications including WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, Douyin, Baidu, Meituan, Weibo, JD.com, etc. have successively adapted to the Hongmeng system. match. On the night of the press conference, the heads of companies such as DingTalk, WPS, JD.com, etc. appeared one by one to support Hongmeng.
What is also reflected behind this is the industry’s expectations for the new business model brought by native Hongmeng. The original control of traffic entrances by iOS and Android has made it difficult for new cakes to appear. They can only cut on the original basic disk, and often cause terminal problems due to sharing issues. A typical case is the secret competition between WeChat and Douyin and Apple due to the “Apple tax”. Ordinary users were once faced with the embarrassing situation of “choosing one of the two”.
Native Hongmeng has accumulated a sufficient traffic pool. Based on the five major capabilities, the benefits of ecological partners are not limited to smartphones, but can also be seamlessly extended to PCs, tablets, wearable devices and other terminals. DingTalk CEO Ye Jun even asserted: In the Hongmeng era, all applications will have the opportunity to be redone. Moreover, hardware manufacturers are also exploring new tracks. Some hardware companies told the media that investing more development resources in Hongmeng has become a certain choice.
On the other hand, Huawei provides “real money” support to its ecosystem partners in terms of technology, traffic, and capital. According to “Caijing” citing information from many application manufacturers responsible for the development of Hongmeng, Huawei will provide technical support and traffic tilt for the first batch of manufacturers to adapt to Hongmeng, including promotion of Huawei channels, app store rankings, etc.; in native Hongmeng, officially Before going online, Huawei also launched an incentive policy for small and medium-sized developers. Those who comply with the policy will have the opportunity to receive incentives of up to one million in cash and traffic worth 5 million. Since this year, Huawei has also launched the “Hongfei Plan” to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the next three years. billion to provide partners with resource support in technical support, marketing and business cooperation.
The biggest starting point of these initiatives is to allow developers to make money and fully demonstrate the commercial value of native Hongmeng. In other words, policy incentives can only solve part of the demand in a short period of time. Hongmeng must continue to provide developers with meat to provide a steady stream of new forces for the improvement of the entire ecosystem. This also tests Huawei’s wisdom in “sharing the cake.”
If a certain super App is absent, it will be a disaster for the entire Hongmeng ecosystem. For example, WeChat, due to the slow adaptation progress, both Tencent and Huawei are under tremendous pressure. WeChat and Hongmeng are, to some extent, also competing at the mobile phone system level. The entanglement between Ma Huateng and Cook may also occur with Hua. But the better thing is that the drive from Qianhai to Songshan Lake only takes two hours, which is much more direct and simpler than crossing an ocean.
Another very important point comes from Huawei’s own efforts: Hardware sales continue to rise. In the first half of this year, Huawei’s sales performance of mobile phones, cars, tablets and other hardware products were very strong. According to IDC data, in the first half of 2024, Huawei accounted for 17.5% of the Chinese market share and shipped 22 million units, ranking first in the Chinese smartphone market. Among them, the market share of products priced above US$600 rose to 28.3%, and the folding screen mobile phone market share reached 55.9%. Shipments increased by 115.1% year-on-year, making it the mobile phone manufacturer with the highest growth rate in the folding screen field;
In terms of the automotive business, Huawei’s Hongmeng Smart Sales sold approximately 200,000 vehicles in the first half of this year, with sales of Wenjie soaring 679.5% year-on-year. Huawei’s Auto BU achieved profitability for the first time. Huawei’s tablet shipments in the first half of the year increased by 77% year-on-year to 4.2 million units, accounting for 28% of the market share.
The report released by Counterpoint also pointed out that the growth of Hongmeng OS’s market share is due to the hot sales of Huawei’s flagship products. Huawei’s efforts in supply chain localization have provided broad space for the market prospects of Hongmeng OS.
This ecological war is more difficult than anyone realizes. But Huawei must win in order to truly gain a foothold in the three-thirds of the world, expand space for its own survival, and make new plans for domestic substitution.
Huawei has a clear understanding of this. As Yu Chengdong said, “Native Hongmeng is a new life and is working hard to grow. Huawei alone cannot build Hongmeng. Only the active participation of ecological partners, the innovative contributions of developers, and the trust and support of consumers can we build Hongmeng Create a strong Hongmeng ecosystem and achieve Hongmeng’s sustainable development.”
In addition to the most difficult and dangerous ecological war at the moment, if native Hongmeng wants to achieve a three-point world pattern with iOS and Android, it cannot just be limited to the domestic market. It must enter the global market and face overseas competition. According to Huawei, Hongmeng will be the first to be commercially available on mobile phones and tablet devices in 2024, and will be enabled on smart screens, cars and other devices starting next year. After achieving full coverage of domestic Huawei terminals and a mature ecosystem, Hongmeng will advance its overseas plans.
According to this timetable, Huawei will once again compete with Android and iOS in the overseas mobile operating system market in at least two years. Moreover, judging from the content of the press conference on October 22, native Hongmeng mainly relied on “meta-services” to break through the blockade overseas. Its function is similar to Android’s “Quick App”. It is developed based on HarmonyOS API. The code can be 100% reused for native application development. It does not require downloading and installation, and it can be independently launched without relying on applications. In June this year, State Grid, KFC, Naixue, Tongcheng, China Guangfa Bank, China Merchants Union Financial, etc. have developed Hongmeng Yuan services.
“Many of our overseas partners and developers have also accessed our Hongmeng ecosystem through meta-services. For example, Southeast Asia’s taxi-hailing app Grab, Hong Kong’s restaurants, and Emirates Airline’s applications can quickly access meta-services and go online quickly.” Yu Chengdong said that yuan services are more convenient than mini programs.
If Huawei can successfully enter overseas markets, native Hongmeng may become a new pillar of Huawei’s revenue, and will also become the biggest driving force for Chinese software and hardware manufacturers to go overseas for gold. According to Bloomberg, Huawei is considering charging a 20% commission on the Hongmeng App Store, which is lower than the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Mobile phone manufacturers roll towards operating systems
If you broaden your view to the entire mobile phone industry, it is easy to find thatAs Hongmeng blows the horn of the operating system, the war between mobile phone manufacturers has evolved from a pure hardware involution to a system and ecological war.
Counting from the AI Ecosystem Conference held by Meizu before the National Day, in the past month, domestic leading mobile phone manufacturers, vivo, OPPO, Huawei, Honor, and Xiaomi have all made efforts on the operating system: vivo and OPPO have successively passed the massive Developer Conference, launching its latest OS; Honor released Magic 9.0 the day after the launch of native Hongmeng, which is quite similar to competing with Huawei. On October 24, Xiaomi also began to warm up the upcoming Thermal OS 2.
Without exception, these manufacturers focus their system capabilities on AI. Honor CEO Zhao Ming said at the MagicOS 9.0 launch conference that this is the industry’s first personalized full-scenario AI operating system equipped with intelligent agents, which has improved in terms of smart interconnection, smooth performance, privacy and security; vivo brings new OriginOS 5, with the support of the blue heart large model matrix, also brings a wealth of AI functions; OPPO ColorOS 15 focuses on smoothness, AI, design, ease of use, etc.; Xiaomi ThePaper OS 2 claims to be “towards AI” A solid step for the whole ecology.”
Earlier, Apple made the largest internal team structure adjustment in more than ten years: In order to better coordinate resources, Apple established a separate “pillar-level” cross-department project to incubate powerful AI that truly combines software and hardware.
The reason for this “focus” is that only manufacturers that are capable of in-depth customization from hardware, chips to operating systems can provide the most complete AI capability solutions in the ecosystem to meet users’ new needs for smart terminals. .
And this is also an opportunity for native Hongmeng. As far as the closed-loop ecosystem of software and hardware is concerned, Huawei and Apple are currently the only two companies that are fully capable of building barrier capabilities. As Jiemian News commented, if the PC era has achieved Microsoft, and the mobile era has achieved Apple and Google, then in the era of artificial intelligence where everything is connected, Hongmeng, with its natural cross-end genes, is the operating system most likely to achieve a breakthrough.
References:
- Jiemian News, “Hongmeng blows the rally call”
- Shenzhen Net Tencent News, “Huawei has another “backup plan” to support domestic substitution. Can native Hongmeng break through Google’s blockade? 》
For more exciting content, follow Titanium Media’s WeChat ID (ID: taimeiti), or download Titanium Media App
