Huawei’s ban by the US government has been more intense this year and with that, the company’s mobile line-up will no longer receive updates on exiting smartphones which had licenses to receive Google’s Android update before the 2019 ban.
With that, the company is expected to make a response on Thursday as well as share its progress on developing a system that can be a replacement for the Androids mobile operating system.
According Richard Yu who is the head of Huawei’s consumer business group is expected to deliver a keynote speech at its annual developers conference in Dongguan which supposed to mark the company’s first official response to the US’ effort to bar its access to chips which is just essential to the development of the company’s mobile smartphone development as a complete bar from partnering up with chipmakers will lead to the ultimate demise of the company’s mobile product line.
For the records, the US government under Donald Trump’s administration further expanded its earlier restrictions which is meant to prevent Huawei from being able to obtain semiconductors without a special license among which is chips made by foreign firms that have been developed or produced with US software and or technology.
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With this, there is a big threat to the Chinese tech giant’s rule as the world’s largest smartphone maker and that can ultimately kill off its mobile business in its entirely as smartphones depends on Chipsets to work.
All these boils don to the fact that the US and China are both in bad terms right now which is why the former continues to push governments around the world to stop their dependence on Huawei among which is it’s 5G technology with the UK recently ousting the company from it’s 5G ambition.
The US had accused Huawei of being too close to the Chinese government and so poses a national security threat on cyber security within the country as well as wherever their technology is being used. But these claims had been endlessly denied by both China and Huawei.
But what is more interesting about this news is the fact that the Chunese giant will get to reveal its progress in the development of it’s own mobile operating system dubbed the Harmony OS which had powered one of it’s smart displays via it’s sub brand Honor.
The Harmony IOS has been tipped by the company’s official to be much faster than both Android and iOS and meant to function on a spectrum of devices ranging from smart home appliances to car and smart phones and smart display and even computers.
“We will introduce the community to a range of new technology developments, including HMS Core 5.0 and EMUI 11, and provide opportunities to discuss directly and openly with our engineers and management these new technologies and market opportunities,” a Huawei spokesman said, noting that it has 1.6 million developers onboard worldwide.
Huawei has however made the U.S. Entity list in May last year when it was barred from working with any US company as well as non-support for new Huawei phone models while the older models got their licenses expired this year.
This has prompted Huawei to opt in for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which is maintained by the company and featuring the Huawei Mobile Service (HMS) in place of the Google Mobile Service (GMS) which consists of all the Google-owned services and applications such as the Play store, GMail, Google Maps and so forth all being swapped out for the Huawei App Gallery, Email and so forth.
It will not want to present HarmonyOS as a genuine Google alternative ahead of the U.S. election in November, in the hope that it might regain access to Google after that, he said.
A key challenge for Huawei is to show that its proprietary AppGallery and Huawei Mobile Services can integrate local apps from different countries and regions, said Tarun Pathak, an industry analyst with Counterpoint.
“The lack of Google services seriously impacts these devices’ appeal against competitors running a full commercial version of Android,” he said.
It’s not yet known whether Huawei is seeking to move completely away from Google with the new ban though the company had made it known it will stick with Android for now and won’t switch to it’s own software unless it’s really necessary.
