The vicissitudes of domestic mobile phone operating systems

In today's article, let's talk about the development history of domestic mobile phone operating systems.

█ 2000-2007: Early exploration of the feature phone era

• "Hexin " system ( Cotai Century )
  

The starting time of domestic mobile phone operating systems is actually not too late.

More than 20 years ago, some Chinese companies tried to develop mobile phone operating systems, including Beijing Ketai Century Technology Co., Ltd.

In May 2000, a middle-aged man named Chen Rong returned to Beijing from the United States, ready to start his own entrepreneurial career.

Rong Chen

Rong Chen graduated from Tsinghua University in 1982 and was sent to the United States to study for a master's degree. In 1987, he received a master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1992, he joined Microsoft Research in the United States and participated in the development of operating systems, IE browsers and other products.

After returning to China, Rong Chen and his friends co-founded a company that specialized in developing network operating systems (named Elastos ). This company is the aforementioned Kotel Century (Rong Chen served as chief scientist).

Based on Chen Rong's technical background, Kotek Century had a relatively large influence in the early days. In February 2002, Chen Rong was even received by the then national leader.

Also in 2002, at the invitation of a Shanghai leader, Kotai Century moved to Shanghai and became Shanghai Kotai Century Technology Co., Ltd.

After moving to Shanghai, based on the mobile phone boom at the time, Kotel Century shifted its strategic direction to the mobile phone market and began to focus on the development of mobile phone operating systems, naming it "Hexin".

In 2004, they signed a cooperation agreement with Datang to conduct comprehensive cooperation based on TD-SCDMA technology. Three years later, in 2007, Kotel Century finally joined hands with a mobile phone manufacturer in Beijing to jointly create the first complete TD-SCDMA mobile phone product equipped with the "Hexin" system.

According to the information, over the years, Rong Chen and his team have written tens of millions of lines of code, including boot programs, operating system kernels, graphics systems, file systems, browsers, databases, etc.

When they went to the relevant department to apply for software copyright, they were questioned by the staff. The staff threw their application materials back and said, "No unit in China has written so much software. It must not be your work."

Whether their software copyright application was successful or not is of little significance. Because, in January 2007, the iPhone was released. At the end of the year, Android was also born. Smart phones rose across the board, and a new era officially arrived.

Rong Chen and Kotel's Hexin operating system gradually disappeared from the public eye. Later, they returned their focus to the Elastos network operating system and stopped developing the mobile operating system project.

• Hopen OS system ( Kaisi Haopeng )

In addition to Kotel, at the beginning of this century, China also launched a mobile phone system that was relatively well-known at the time - Hopen OS.

In the late 1990s, Microsoft Corporation of the United States launched a plan called "Venus" to the world . They planned to streamline the embedded Windows CE operating system, make a simplified system (Venus system), and then install it on some set-top boxes and VCD machines to realize the Internet access function.

Microsoft's ambition to enter the home appliance market has attracted the attention of the domestic industry.

In order to compete with Microsoft, the Software Engineering Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also launched an embedded operating system development plan and named it the "Nuwa Project".

The operating system they developed, called Hopen OS, is mainly aimed at handheld PCs, set-top boxes, industrial control systems, network terminals, digital TVs and other products.

At that time, the Software Engineering Research and Development Center adopted a market-oriented operation mode. In December 1998, they initiated the establishment of a subsidiary company, Beijing Kaisi Haopeng Software Engineering Technology Co., Ltd., which was dedicated to leading the development of Hopen OS.

Just one year later, on September 3, 1999, the company held a press conference in the Great Hall of the People, announcing the establishment of a strategic alliance with Motorola Semiconductor and stating that Hopen OS had been ported to Motorola's PowerPC 860 processor.

In June 2000, Lenovo launched the Dimensity 810 PDA, which was the first to adopt Hopen OS and became the first product in China to be equipped with an independent mobile operating system.

The market performance of the Dimensity 810 handheld computer was not satisfactory . In July 2001, Lenovo launched the Dimensity 911 handheld computer, which still used the Hopen OS system.

On November 26, 2001, Kaisi Hopen released the "Nuwa Hopen SDK Dimensity 911 Test Version" system, which opened up the possibility of adapting third-party applications to Dimensity 911. In other words, third-party companies can develop applications for this system and install them on Dimensity 911. This is a huge breakthrough.

As time went by, the PDA product market gradually cooled down, and mobile phones began to become popular. Kaisi Haopeng also made strategic adjustments, abandoning the PDA market and focusing on the mobile phone market.

Lenovo is still the partner of Kaisi Hopen. In August 2003, China Unicom launched the business phone G800, which was the first phone equipped with Hopen OS .

Later, mobile phone manufacturers including NEC, Eastcom, CECT, Haier, etc. launched mobile phone products equipped with Hopen OS, but these products did not have much influence.

The main problem of Hopen OS at that time was its poor scalability. It did not support the installation and expansion of native apps and had limited functions, so it was not popular among users.

In 2005, the industry and users gradually lost patience with Hopen OS, and Hopen OS began to fade out of history. According to data, the last major version update of Hopen OS was in 2007.

In addition to "Hopen" and "Hopen OS", other domestically developed operating systems during that period also included Delta (Dao System) of Keyin Jingcheng and Doeasy (Doeasy System) of Bird.

Due to the lack of strong support from third-party application software and insufficient cooperation with operators, these operating systems lack sufficient market competitiveness and have not caused any waves.

█ 2007-2018: Custom development for Android

As mentioned earlier, in 2007, driven by the iPhone and Android , mobile phones fully entered the era of smart phones .

Apple iPhone is a closed ecosystem, while Android is an open source system.

Android is an operating system built on the Linux kernel. It can be divided into three main parts:

Open source code (AOSP, Android Open Source Project)

Android proprietary code (some non-open source components provided by Google or other third-party vendors)

Google ecosystem (GMS, Google Mobile Services)

Needless to say, the open source part is shared by everyone. Google only owns a part of the proprietary code. GMS is truly controlled by Google.

GMS is a series of applications and services built by Google specifically for Android . It is the basis of a series of services such as Google Service Framework, Google Account, Google Play App Store, Google Security Certification, etc. Only with it can you install apps such as Search, Gmail, Talk, Maps, YouTube, etc. These apps are very common abroad.

After Google withdrew from China, domestic mobile phones basically no longer pre-installed the GMS framework, and some Google services cannot be used. (Of course, you can also install and use them through some special methods.)

Just as some manufacturers at that time liked to call desktop operating systems developed based on Linux as domestic operating systems, some manufacturers also called mobile phone operating systems developed based on Android as domestic mobile phone operating systems.

• OMS system (China Mobile)
  

In 2008, China Mobile officially launched the "first domestically produced mobile phone operating system" - OMS (Open Mobile System).

OMS claims to be an independent system that is on par with Android. But in fact, it is developed based on the Android source code. It is essentially an Android system with a few modifications and the addition of mobile apps (such as 139 mailbox, Mobile Dream Network, Fetion, etc.).

China Mobile had a lot of contract phones and customized phones at the time. The main purpose of developing OMS was to use these phones to develop its own ecosystem, just like Apple's ecosystem.

In the third quarter of 2009, the first China Mobile customized phone equipped with OMS system, Lenovo OPhone, was officially released. Later, some models of brands including Dopod, Motorola, and Philips also equipped with this system.

After OMS was released, it was criticized by users for its ugly interface, slow system and poor user experience. Many users would choose to flash their OPhone and switch back to Android system as soon as possible after purchasing it.

The SDK of OMS was not very friendly to developers, and many software developers were unwilling to develop for OMS. As a result, after a few years, this system gradually disappeared.

• TIOS system (China Unicom)

In addition to China Mobile, China Unicom also developed its own mobile operating system at that time.

In 2008, China Unicom organized domestic companies such as Shenzhen Quanzhida, Cotai Century, Data Institute, China Telecom, ZTE, Tianyu Communications, Pengzhi Technology, and Inventec to start independent research and development of 3G mobile intelligent operating system and basic software platform ( UniPlus platform ), and prepared to launch the UPhone mobile phone based on this platform.

In 2009, the UPhone project was listed as a major national nuclear high-tech project, and was personally led by the then chairman Chang Xiaobing.

On February 28, 2011, China Unicom held a press conference in Beijing to officially launch WoPhone (also known as UPhone) and "China's first smart terminal operating system with independent intellectual property rights " - TIOS (Trust Internet Operating System ) .

At that time, domestic and foreign first-tier mobile phone manufacturers such as Tianyu, Inventec, Motorola, Samsung, Huawei, ZTE, TCL, and HTC all displayed WoPhone terminal products.

At the time of the release, a leader of China Unicom emphasized that "WoPhone TIOS has nothing to do with Android, has completely independent intellectual property rights, and is completely self-controlled ." " WoPhone TIOS is based on the Linux kernel and has independently developed core business functions and basic applications including GUI, security components, application framework, SDK, etc. " ( In fact, how should I put it? TIOS and Android are cousins. )

The user experience of WoPhone is better than that of China Mobile's OMS. However, WoPhone, like OMS, is not compatible with Android. At that time, Android was already the mainstream, occupying nearly half of the market share. The incompatibility caused many apps to be unusable on WoPhone .

In the end, WoPhone also failed. In 2014, Shenzhen Quanzhida, the R&D company of WoPhone, was acquired by Tongzhou Electronics. WoPhone became the mobile system platform for mobile phones, smart boxes, pads and other terminals under Tongzhou Electronics, and was renamed 960 OS.

• YunOS (Alibaba Cloud)

After the operators started to take action, mobile phone manufacturers and Internet giants followed suit. Among the Internet giants, Alibaba Cloud is a representative one.

In July 2011, Alibaba Cloud officially launched YunOS, which is based on Linux. At the same time, they also teamed up with Tianyu Langtong to launch the first smartphone equipped with YunOS.

Although Alibaba Cloud claimed at the time that YunOS was not based on Android, some developers later discovered that YunOS was very similar to Android, with almost identical modules and architectures. Some people even broke the news online, saying that YunOS only rewrote the virtual machine and replaced some services, and nothing else changed.

After the emergence of YunOS, it was severely suppressed by Google .

Google's reason is: YunOS is clearly modified on the Android system, but it refuses to admit it. Moreover, YunOS is not fully compatible with Android , which may destroy the software ecosystem of Android . Another point is that there are many pirated applications in the YunOS software store, which damages the rights of Android developers.

On September 13, 2012, Alibaba Cloud was originally scheduled to jointly launch a new A800 mobile phone with Acer running YunOS. However, under pressure from Google, Acer was forced to cancel the cooperation one hour before the launch.

Alibaba Cloud said in an official statement at the time: "If (Acer) equips its new products with YunOS , Google will terminate its cooperation with its Android products and related technology authorizations."

Subsequently , Google defined YunOS as a "non-compatible version of Android" . This means that YunOS has completely lost the possibility of being compatible with Android applications. In addition, Google issued a warning to mobile phone manufacturers: whoever uses YunOS will be kicked out of the Android Alliance.

Under such circumstances, most mobile phone manufacturers have given up cooperating with YunOS. Only Meizu, as well as small manufacturers or copycat manufacturers such as Xiaolajiao, DOOV, Newman, Dingzhi, Xunrui, and Water World are willing to use YunOS . The main reason why Meizu uses YunOS is because Alibaba is its shareholder.

In 2015, according to a market research company's report data, in the domestic smartphone market, Android's share is expected to be 81.36%, iOS is expected to be 11.00%, and YunOS is expected to be 7.10%. Based on this data, Alibaba stated at the YunOS 5 launch conference: "YunOS has become the third largest mobile operating system . "

Later, as Meizu continued to lose in the fierce market competition and small-brand and copycat phones were gradually eliminated, YunOS's market share continued to decline.

On September 27, 2017, Alibaba integrated the original YunOS mobile terminal business and released AliOS, an IoT operating system for automobiles, IoT terminals, IoT chips and industrial fields. The name YunOS gradually faded out of people's sight.

Similar to YunOS, Baidu Cloud OS ( launched in June 2012, shut down in March 2015, survived for 3 years ) and Tencent TOS (public beta in March 2015, shut down in June 2017, survived for 2 years) also had a similar fate. The failure of these projects was basically due to insufficient investment of resources and lack of ecological support.

• Mobile phone manufacturers customized system

In short, the entire landscape of mobile phone operating systems was quite chaotic at the time. There were many third-party systems launched, some real and some fake, some good and some bad, and basically all claimed to be domestically produced operating systems, but few of them could really last long. Mobile phone manufacturers' self-developed systems were still the main way to achieve this.

█ 2019-Present: From deep customization to complete self-development

Around 2019, as time went by, the competition landscape of the domestic mobile phone market gradually became clear. A large number of small and medium-sized brands were eliminated, leaving only a few large brands, such as Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, etc.

Fierce competition has forced mobile phone manufacturers to try every possible way to improve mobile phone performance and experience in order to gain recognition from users and the market.

They gradually realized that if the mobile phone only used someone else's chips and matched someone else's system, it would be difficult for them to escape the fate of being an "assembly factory " . Moreover, if they wanted the mobile phone to bring a better experience to users, they had to fully intervene in the bottom layer of the mobile phone and deeply participate in the core development.

Therefore, these manufacturers have started their own mobile phone chip and operating system development projects. This approach is extremely risky, but mobile phone manufacturers are eager to try it.

What everyone is more familiar with are Huawei's Kirin and Hongmeng projects, Xiaomi's Pengpai project, OPPO's Mariana project, vivo's V series chip projects, etc.

• Hongmeng system

Let’s focus on Hongmeng, which has been very popular in recent years.

Hongmeng is different from other projects. As we all know, it is a project that was "forced out".

Huawei's early mobile phone operating system was also a customized system based on Android, called EMUI. In 2012, Huawei first launched Emotion UI, namely EMUI 1.0.

Later, Huawei's mobile phone business grew rapidly, not only standing out among domestic mobile phone manufacturers, but also posing a threat to Apple. At this time, the United States began to impose sanctions.

On May 15, 2019, then-US President Trump issued a presidential order prohibiting the use of information and communications technology and services from "hostile countries " and authorized the US Department of Commerce to implement it. On the same day, the US Department of Commerce announced specific measures to implement the presidential order and added Huawei to the "Entity List".

In the mobile phone field, not only has Huawei's SoC chip supply chain been completely suppressed, but its mobile phone operating system has also been restricted. Huawei phones cannot obtain official Android updates from Google, and can no longer be pre-installed with Google's GMS and Apps. This has dealt a heavy blow to Huawei's mobile phone business (especially in overseas markets), and sales have plummeted .

Changes in China’s mobile phone market shipments (data from IDC, LatePost)

Fortunately, Huawei also made some preparations in advance. Not to mention chips, in terms of operating systems, there are rumors that when Huawei launched EMUI in 2012, it was actually planning a completely self-developed operating system. In terms of kernel architecture, compilers, file systems, etc., Huawei has made technical arrangements and reserved relevant talents.

After the sanctions were imposed, Huawei proposed the backup plan "Hongmeng".

Around August 2018, Huawei submitted a trademark application for "Huawei Hongmeng" in China. On May 24, 2019, the trademark application was approved. At the same time, they also submitted applications in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Australia and other countries.

In June 2019, Huawei CEO Richard Yu publicly stated: "Huawei's self-developed operating system will be released as early as this fall and at the latest next spring . " This has attracted widespread attention in the industry.

Soon after, on August 9, 2019, at Huawei's Developer Conference, the 1.0 version of the Hongmeng operating system was officially released, with the English name HarmonyOS 1.0 . This was the first public appearance of Hongmeng.

After the debut of Hongmeng, everyone has raised a question: "Is Hongmeng just 'Android with a new skin'?"

At that time, many media and professional users conducted various analyses, and the conclusions tended to be that Hongmeng was just "Android with a new skin."

However, in the face of doubts, Huawei remained silent and did not make any response or explanation.

Looking back now, Huawei's strategy was very wise. Their route, in simple terms, consists of three steps: binding, coexistence, and substitution.

In the early days, Hongmeng imitated and depended on Android. By being fully compatible with Android, it ensured that it could use the Android ecosystem. In other words, anything that works on Android can also work on Hongmeng.

If you start by developing a completely self-developed, independent operating system, which developer will develop apps for you?

Next, Huawei began to work hard to build an ecosystem. In fact, the shipment volume of Huawei mobile phones and related digital products had reached a certain scale before the sanctions. The large shipment volume of products won the recognition of users.

As a developer, what matters is the number of users. If there is a large number, people will be willing to participate.

In order to reduce the difficulty for ecosystem companies to join the Hongmeng ecosystem, Huawei has also developed a large number of "conversion" tools. Some tools allow developers to easily create Hongmeng applications based on their own Android applications. Some tools, in turn, allow developers to quickly generate Android applications after developing Hongmeng applications.

In this way, the Hongmeng ecosystem will reach a considerable level by 2023. At this time, the time is ripe to cut off from Android and launch a pure-blooded Hongmeng.

In September 2023, Huawei announced that HarmonyOS NEXT will be released soon, and HarmonyOS native applications will be fully launched. It will no longer be compatible with Android and only HarmonyOS-specific apps can be used.

On October 22, 2024, Huawei announced the official release of the native Hongmeng operating system (HarmonyOS NEXT). In many media news, it is called " China's first fully self-developed operating system " and "China's first domestically produced mobile operating system."

According to the data revealed at the press conference, Hongmeng currently has more than 110 million lines of code, 6.75 million registered developers and more than 1 billion Hongmeng ecosystem devices. There are more than 15,000 Hongmeng native applications and meta-services already on the shelves.

Today, Hongmeng not only serves Huawei's mobile phone business market, but is also a cross-domain operating system platform. Cars, speakers, headphones, watches, bracelets, tablets, large screens, AR/VR and other devices are all applications of Hongmeng. Hongmeng has even launched a plan for PCs.

It has to be admitted that Huawei has reached an unprecedented height in the country in the self-developed operating system. For domestic independent research and development companies, the success of Hongmeng can also inspire everyone's confidence.

Huawei's Hongmeng has achieved initial success, but it is too early to say that it is completely successful. The operating system is a global market. In the current global political environment, whether Hongmeng can gain global ecological recognition and further challenge the status of Android and iOS will be the challenges that Hongmeng will face.

█ Final words

Well, the above is a historical review of domestic mobile phone operating systems.

In general, the situation faced by domestic mobile phone operating systems is very similar to that of domestic desktop/server operating systems. After continuous exploration in the early stage and experiencing various chaos, the overall operating system has begun to move towards a healthy development track. Although the current market share is not very ideal, the product itself has made great progress. Ecological awareness has also been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.

The core competitiveness of an operating system lies in experience and ecology. Especially ecology, which cannot be solved in the short term. If everyone works together, we will surely be able to make a world-leading fully domestic operating system after years of accumulation.

That’s all for now, thank you for your patience in reading!