Huawei launched a new mobile operating system, but its growth is slow as its market share is still small.
China Telecom recently launched HarmonyOS 4, which includes Xiao Ai, a voice assistant connected to the company's AI Pangu model, capable of joining calls and summarizing texts.
“The HarmonyOS ecosystem has made great strides over the past four years, and we have overcome many challenges to make great strides,” said Richard Yu, President of Huawei's Smartphone Business, during the system presentation at the Huawei Developer Conference.
Huawei first introduced HarmonyOS as an operating system for connected smart devices, but the company was added to a ban list in the United States in 2019, restricting exports of the technology there.
As a result, Huawei phones are no longer able to use the Android operating system, forcing the company to adopt HarmonyOS as the operating system for smartphones.
As the Hongmeng OS appears on more and more enterprise devices, Huawei is urging manufacturers to develop consumer electronics compatible with the OS.
In July, more than 700 million devices were running HarmonyOS, an increase of about 20% compared to last November.
However, growth will slow between 2021 and 2022, with the number of HarmonyOS devices nearly tripling in 12 months.
Much of the recent growth has come from products compatible with Hongmeng OS, which has struggled to sell smartphones. The main reason for the lower numbers is US restrictions on advanced semiconductors, which prevent Huawei from making 5G phones.
According to Counterpoint, the operating system has a market share of 2% of all smartphones worldwide, but only 8% in China.
In early 2010, competition emerged on smartphone operating systems, which ranked third behind Android and iOS. Competitors included Mozilla Firefox and Samsung's Tizen, but these operating systems failed to attract consumers and the alternatives disappeared.
"The operating system needs a market share of 16% to survive," a Huawei executive told Chinese media.
Huawei initially had to join the OS race due to US sanctions, but Hongmeng OS could also join the competition.
Huawei is currently witnessing a boom in sales of its advanced smartphones, as the company is trying to revitalize its business with smartphones that support fifth generation networks. However, the US is discussing tighter censorship of it-ci, which could hurt the company's chances of publishing HarmonyOS. .