The story of Huawei and its relationship with the U.S. government is a long one. The Chinese technology conglomerate was cut from doing business with American companies, including Google, back in 2019, citing security concerns by U.S. authorities.
Five years later, Huawei mobile devices are running the company’s homegrown HarmonyOS and the brand is experiencing a resurrection on the Chinese smartphone market.
The latest numbers by research firm Counterpoint have shown that while Apple’s Q1 sales dropped from 19.7% in 2023 to just 15.7% this year, Huawei’s HarmonyOS-powered devices are on the verge of surpassing the American rival with a market share of 15.5 percent.
Huawei is set to surpass iOS’s market share in China this year and possibly even compete for the top position on this list of best-selling smartphone brands, currently occupied by Vivo’s 17.7%. However, Huawei’s ambitions go far beyond the domestic market, with HarmonyOS being the key element.
As The Register reported, Huawei has a plan that, eventually, should put HarmonyOS in a position to rival iOS and Android on the global stage, citing recent statements of the company’s rotating chairman, Erik Xu, who also said:
“In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS.”
Xu specified that Huawei is in the process of porting the first 4,000 apps while talking to developers of the remaining thousand. Once this crucial pool is fulfilled and complemented by thousands of other apps, HarmonyOS will be ready to fight its way outside of China.
While Xu claims that Huawei’s “massive undertaking” has broad support in the industry, the fact is that creating a relevant mobile platform to compete with iOS and Android is a huge challenge, one that many others, including Microsoft, have failed to achieve.
Windows 10 Mobile suffered from an “app gap,” and bridges, such as Project Astoria, were in the works to offer an easy way of bringing popular apps from competing platforms. Attracting developers and proving that Microsoft’s mobile platform is relevant was key. However, Microsoft never achieved this goal, and the rest is history.
HarmonyOS will, certainly, face similar challenges. Huawei is working with Chinese academia to attract young developers and to teach them how to work with the platform. However, the company will have to replicate this abroad. Until then, Huawei’s plan is… just a plan.
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