Are 1,000 partners enough to protect Huawei's Hongmeng system?

Previous experience tells us that maintaining a relatively large operating system requires long-term resource investment from more than one company.

Therefore, for Huawei's HarmonyOS, which is officially open to the industry, establishing a software and hardware business ecosystem where Huawei and other industry manufacturers can prosper together is one of the most important goals at this stage. Before the official release of HarmonyOS, Huawei seemed to have already made preparations.

Public data shows that the Harmony ecosystem already has more than 300 application and service providers, and just over 1,000 hardware equipment manufacturers. These manufacturers are involved in office, sports, health, smart home, travel, and audio and video entertainment scenarios, basically covering the mainstream needs of Internet users.

Hongmeng has just officially debuted and the number of users has reached four digits. What are the backgrounds of these Hongmeng hardware manufacturers? What kind of experience can they bring to consumers using Hongmeng? And what kind of value can they create for the entire ecosystem?

IoT is the biggest area of ​​cooperation with Hongmeng

Although we are talking about Hongmeng, in fact, only Huawei-branded products use the mobile version of Hongmeng for the time being, so third-party manufacturers are participating in HarmonyOS Connect. It is developed from the Huawei HiLink smart ecosystem that has been developed for many years. It inherits the past technology routes and product support lineup, and naturally accepts partners. We can see many familiar manufacturers.

First of all, there are home appliance manufacturers. There are many well-known old brands, such as Midea, Joyoung, Skyworth, Supor, Robam, Sacon, Fotile, etc. There are also emerging companies that have joined the home appliance market in recent years, such as XGIMI, Ecovacs, Liangba, etc. From the perspective of the entire lineup, the Hongmeng ecosystem has attracted at least half of the home appliance industry, and consumers can relatively easily buy brands that support Hongmeng when purchasing home appliances.

Midea should be one of the most active home appliance manufacturers in connecting to the Hongmeng Intelligent Connection Ecosystem. Not only has it provided relevant support for many new products, but it has also changed the operating system running on its devices to the IoT version of Hongmeng. The most well-known are the steam ovens and other home appliances that have been displayed many times at the Hongmeng press conferences. Hongmeng system mobile phones can be paired with appliances with just a single sticker, and there is an intuitive card interface.

Then there are IoT manufacturers that focus on smart homes. The names of these manufacturers are relatively low-key. Compared with making products directly for consumers, many IoT industry partners who have joined the Hongmeng ecosystem will choose commercial solutions to provide support and services for higher-level products. The IoT products or complete solutions that consumers buy from other brands that support Hongmeng may be related to them.

Finally, there are real estate manufacturers, including COFCO Land, China Resources, Sunac China Holdings, Longfor Group, etc. The combination of real estate and Hongmeng seems unexpected but is actually reasonable: when promoting Hongmeng for scenarios such as fine decoration and commercial real estate, real estate developers who control real estate projects are obviously more suitable channels, and compared to reinventing the wheel in the unfamiliar field of the Internet of Things, real estate is more suitable to use existing excellent IoT capabilities to enhance services.

The appeal of Hongmeng ecosystem comes from its simplicity

The meaning and goals of Huawei's Hongmeng that we see today have changed considerably.

Whether it is the Harmony system or the Harmony Intelligent Connection Ecosystem, the original and purest purpose is to complete Huawei's full-scenario "1+8+N" strategy, connecting Huawei mobile phones, tablets, PCs, wearables and other products with devices produced by more manufacturers in a more efficient way than traditional wireless connection protocols and experiences.

In 2019 and 2020, when Hongmeng OS was just emerging, Huawei talked more about the concepts and ideas of this system and ecosystem. For example, Hongmeng OS will be a full-scenario distributed OS based on a microkernel, which will adapt to multiple devices and scenarios such as IoT, mobile phones, smart screens, and car machines from 128KB to 512MB to GB. Developers can run applications on different devices at low cost after developing them once, and can also turn different independent devices into a "super terminal" distributed soft bus.

Now that the version number of HarmonyOS has reached 2.0, we can see its actual value. The most typical example is the HyperTerminal interactive interface that appeared with the official mobile phone/tablet version of HarmonyOS. With the current device as the center, other devices that can be used are displayed around. You can directly drag to transfer the screen and video call played on the mobile phone to the smart screen.

Even in 2021, when the smartphone industry has entered an era of stock competition, the complicated steps of "opening the menu → searching and selecting devices → pairing to connect → completing collaborative operations" are still required for connecting a mobile phone to other devices. Compared with the traditional multi-device connection and interaction experience, Hongmeng simplifies it to a single-look and one-pull process, which brings considerable progress.

As Huawei and the entire industry have seen, not only mobile phones, but also all kinds of devices around us, including cars, home appliances, and smart homes, are becoming intelligent. If the user experience is still stuck in using them like completing a checklist, it will be difficult to reduce the burden on users, let alone any progress. For ordinary users, Hongmeng greatly reduces the threshold for systematic use of multi-device collaboration.

This is also the core factor that has attracted thousands of hardware partners to Hongmeng, simplifying the distance between different brands and categories of products and users by dragging and dropping on a graphical interface and involving a consistent card interface. Before this, almost every manufacturer had to spend time building a set of services, and users had to install different management applications for each brand or even each product.

A simple and fast multi-device collaborative experience, and it is likely to have a huge number of users, this is the current Harmony system and ecosystem.

1,000 is not enough

As Yang Haisong, Vice President of Huawei Consumer Business AI and Smart All-Scenario Business Department, said at the Hongmeng Intelligent Connection Partner Summit held half a month ago, Huawei has always been a company that is better at making products in person. From communication base stations for the commercial market to mobile phones, PCs, and wearables for consumers, Huawei has shown a strong momentum and an invincible momentum.

For well-known reasons, Huawei's original multi-device strategy was brought forward along with Hongmeng. The company began to change its mindset from making good products to building an ecosystem that allows partners to make money. In addition to experience improvements, Huawei also showed figures such as 300 million devices, 60,000 offline channels, and three major e-commerce platforms, hoping to "help partners make more money and make the pie bigger."

Huawei's vision is very good. Through the operating system and ecosystem built with the same concept, all industry participants, including users, will benefit. However, as we have witnessed in history, before being good or not, any product should be good or not. In the Hongmeng ecosystem, it is the diversity and richness of product categories.

Obviously, 1,000 companies are far from enough for the huge industry it is targeting. What's more, although Huawei Hongmeng is moving fast, it is by no means a lone traveler.

In the domestic market, Xiaomi has provided low-cost connection modules early on, and has begun to focus on the integration of IoT platforms and mobile phone experience in the past two years. The other two leading mobile phone manufacturers, OPPO and vivo, are also making intensive layouts. In the foreign market, Amazon and Google have become the leaders in multi-device experience. Apple, which is good at experience, is also expected to bring changes through the integration of software and hardware.

Whether Hongmeng can lead Huawei and more companies to new heights and support a new industry story, everything has just begun.