Who is the biggest obstacle for Huawei's Hongmeng OS?

In less than a week, the number of upgraded users exceeded 10 million, and various institutions and companies have supported Huawei... Harmony OS 2 has brought a lot of good news just over a dozen days after its release.

Relevant data shows that currently there are more than 1,000 hardware manufacturers, more than 300 App service providers and more than 500,000 developers participating in the construction of the Harmony ecosystem.

For a while, supporting and adapting Hongmeng OS seemed to become a "trend".

But when various institutions were chasing after this "trend", people were surprised to find that domestic mobile phone manufacturers rarely spoke out, and only Meizu , a "down-and-out company", stood up to express its support.

However, Meizu has only applied Hongmeng to smart home products, not mobile phones. This situation has also angered users of major mobile phone manufacturers, and some Mi fans even went to Lei Jun's Weibo to "force the palace" and call for Hongmeng.

Some users even said:

If Xiaomi and OV do not use the Hongmeng system, we will not buy their mobile phones. We will buy Meizu and let Meizu regain its glory!

This makes people wonder why mobile phone manufacturers are unwilling to use Hongmeng system? And what will be the future development of Hongmeng system?

The “interests” behind Hongmeng OS

If HarmonyOS is the "life and death line" of Huawei mobile phones, for OV, Xiaomi and Honor, which went solo last year, equipping domestic mobile phone manufacturers with HarmonyOS means that the "life and death line" is in the hands of Huawei.

Readers who don’t understand technology will definitely start to argue, while readers who know a little bit about technology will say, isn’t Hongmeng already open source? How could Huawei possibly hold the lifeline of its competitors in its own hands?

It is worth noting that the open source version of "Open Harmony" is not the same as Huawei's previously released operating system "Harmony OS".

Harmony OS is the "Huawei smart terminal operating system" and is the commercial version developed by Huawei for its smartphones and IoT devices; Open Harmony was donated by Huawei to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation in two installments in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The Open Atom Open Source Foundation integrated the contributions of other participants to form the Open Harmony open source project.

Based on Open Harmony, all smart terminal manufacturers can carry out secondary development and develop operating systems suitable for their own hardware.

If we compare the two, Open Harmony is like the foundation, and Harmony OS is the building Huawei built. The Hongmeng system we are discussing is the latter, and this system is not currently open source.

Back to the topic, why don’t domestic mobile phone manufacturers support Harmony OS?

As we all know, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have been using low-price strategies to seize domestic mobile phone market share, with Xiaomi being the leader among them.

Just before Xiaomi went public, Lei Jun said: "Xiaomi's 'hardware comprehensive net profit margin' will never exceed 5%. If it exceeds the limit, it will be returned to users in full."

In 2019, Xiaomi's financial report showed that Xiaomi's hardware profit was only 1%. Netizens also said that Lei Jun was not bragging. In fact, in the fiercely competitive hardware market, the net profit margin has always been very low, and few hardware products have achieved a net profit of 5%.

"Mobile phones don't make money, they just make friends" has become a popular saying in the domestic mobile phone industry. But behind this, are mobile phone manufacturers really not making money?

The answer is obviously no. There has always been no shortage of ways for domestic mobile phone manufacturers to make profits. The most typical one is the distribution of applications and content through their respective app stores. It is said that the profit sharing ratio with developers is as high as 50% (higher than the 70-30 split of Google and Apple).

Taking game applications as an example, the mobile phone manufacturer's application store will charge 50% of the game turnover as a channel operation commission. When a user recharges 100 yuan into the game, more than 50 yuan goes directly into the pocket of the mobile phone manufacturer, and the rest is divided among the publisher, operator, and R&D center. Finally, it may only be left with a dozen yuan in the hands of the actual game developer, which sometimes cannot even cover the cost.

But for mobile phone manufacturers, this part of revenue is one of their most important sources of profit.

Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers are bound to firmly control the application distribution channels based on the Android operating system. Not only that, their respective Android customized systems are already very mature in experience, while the OpenHarmony experience on smartphones is actually very simple.

This means that players such as Xiaomi, OV, etc. will not choose Hongmeng for their smartphones, and the same is true for Meizu.

At the same time, the current overseas mobile phone market is also a battleground for domestic mobile phone manufacturers. In order to prevent the Android code base from being "split", Google previously required all manufacturers using the Android system to sign an anti-fragmentation agreement and not engage in any behavior that would split Android.

If domestic mobile phones use the Harmony system at this time, Google may use this as an opportunity to block the GMS authorization of the manufacturer's mobile phones. If the GMS authorization is blocked and Harmony is not successfully launched overseas, domestic mobile phone manufacturers will undoubtedly lose all overseas markets.

The former "dominant player" left Xiaomi, OV and others daunted

While Huawei decided to vigorously develop its "operating system", other mobile phone manufacturers could not forget another identity of itss: it was once the "dominant player" of domestic mobile phones.

In this regard, we might as well recall another story: At Huawei's 2019 first half performance conference, a South China Morning Post reporter asked a question on the spot, saying that a report showed that Huawei was the only mobile phone brand in China to achieve growth, and the mainland mobile phone market was gradually becoming a "monopoly" situation. "Does Huawei have a guilty conscience?"

At the scene, Huawei's chairman Liang Hua gave a highly emotional response to this question: Huawei's pursuit is not necessarily what proportion of the market the smartphone business occupies. "I don't think there will be a single dominant company in the future. What's important is whether the product can meet the consumer's usage needs."

From Liang Hua's point of view, from the perspective of product experience and the current market economy, no matter how well Huawei does with Hongmeng OS, it is only Huawei's own business.

Under this premise, whether domestic mobile phone manufacturers will choose to use Huawei only needs to consider market factors.

Behind this, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have to be on guard against this former overlord.

Currently, Huawei's mobile phone business has stagnated due to reasons such as chips, but according to Huawei's director and senior vice president Chen Lifang, although the United States has increased sanctions on Huawei and caused it to lose the contract manufacturers it relies on, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. still insists on developing world-class semiconductor products.

Meanwhile, Chen Lifang told Nikkei and other news outlets that Huawei has no plans to lay off HiSilicon employees, and said HiSilicon will continue to develop semiconductors and will be able to cope with the sanctions, which are expected to last two to three years.

Chen said other countries are also promoting their own semiconductor industries, which will help HiSilicon gain new supply chain partners that are not dependent on U.S. technology. Chen said she hopes this can be achieved within a few years.

Leifeng.com learned from relevant insiders that Huawei plans to solve the supply problem of mobile phone chips by building its own factory as early as the middle of next year and at the latest by the end of next year. By then, Huawei's mobile phone business is expected to "make a comeback" in 2023.

Hongmeng's biggest obstacle: Huawei itself and its blind boasters

Telecom analyst Fu Liang believes that the advancement of HarmonyOS 2 is beyond doubt, judging from the design concept, R&D planning, resource investment, and the results achieved so far. Huawei's human resources investment in Hongmeng under great pressure is far from comparable to the previous HiSilicon chips, and is more like Huawei's early communication network equipment. Moreover, the resources, investment, and R&D specifications that Huawei can call on are far from comparable to those at that time. But this does not mean that HarmonyOS 2 will definitely succeed.

However, judging from the experience of previous operating system failures, the problem is mostly not the technology itself, but the failure of ecological construction, such as Symbian, which was led by Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, and BlackBerry, which has always been small and beautiful.

Therefore, Fu Liang believes that for Hongmeng to succeed, Huawei must undergo a top-down change:

First, Hongmeng must be independent of Huawei's consumer business as soon as possible and establish a very open culture from the beginning, which is something Huawei cannot do at present. Focusing on its own interests and success in crushing its competitors is the key to success for Huawei, which produces telecommunications network equipment. This is not suitable for consumer businesses or cloud services that require a healthier competitive environment, and even less suitable for areas such as operating systems where openness is a key factor.

Second, when promoting, cut off the relationship between Huawei and Hongmeng. If you want to promote Hongmeng, promote Hongmeng, and if you want to promote Huawei, promote Huawei. Don't promote Huawei's Hongmeng, as this is not conducive to the construction of Hongmeng's ecosystem.