On June 2, Huawei officially released Harmony OS 2.0, which is Huawei’s own Hongmeng operating system.

In fact, Huawei’s Hongmeng operating system has been available for a long time, but the early stage was a small-scale test of the water, and this version 2.0 can be said to be its official commercial version for a full range of consumer Electronic products.

As it happens, in the past two days, Google’s Android, which is the operating system currently used by Huawei’s mobile phones and tablets, has clearly excluded Huawei and even Honor when it released its latest Android 12 push list, while other domestic brands such as Xiaomi, OPPO, VIVO, OnePlus, ZTE, and Transsion are all on the list.

Therefore, when Google refused to provide Android to Google due to the influence of the US entity list, it seamlessly launched its own operating system, Hongmeng, which was a bit of a rebirth.

Regarding the features of Harmony OS 2.0, everyone must have been bombarded by various analysis articles from major media and do not want to take a look at it again, so I won’t say more here.

A few days ago, an internal Huawei memo showed that Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei called on the company’s employees to “dare to lead the world in the field of software.” Ren Zhengfei said that due to external restrictions, it is difficult for Huawei to produce advanced hardware in the short term, and it should focus on building software. Ecosystems, such as Hongmeng OS, Mindspore, an all-scenario AI computing framework, and other IT products.

After all, Huawei, which does not have chips in the future, will find it difficult to continue to expand its territory in the hardware field, and software consisting of lines of code is the most likely route for Huawei to survive.

Moreover, there are countless precedents in the world of technology companies that have survived without hardware products, such as Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and so on.

Therefore, the launch of Hongmeng is indeed of great significance to Huawei.

So is it possible that Hongmeng will be “stuck in the neck” in the future? Hongmeng OS is not an operating system that completely re-writes every line of code from the bottom. With this capability, there are not enough developers willing to start developing based on your operating system again. After all, IOS and Android are not without a market.

In an interview with Wang Chenglu, the person in charge of Hongmeng, the media “Latter”, Wang Chenglu said frankly: Hongmeng will also absorb the excellent technologies and codes of the open source community, and use the open source code of AOSP (Android Open Source Project). According to the AOSP agreement, its code is open and allowed to be used. Whether it is Huawei, Xiaomi or OPPO, using the AOSP code to build its own operating system, the US government cannot control it at all, because Google has no control over it. Right, or Google controls Android, which is also based on AOSP, not AOSP.

This also makes it easier for Android developers to develop HarmonyOS-based applications.

Therefore, what really poses a challenge to Hongmeng is not whether its code will be “banned” one day in the future, but how big Hongmeng’s plate or ecology can be.

The biggest feature of Hongmeng is that it can achieve full coverage of different types of devices, or an operating system for the Internet of Everything (IoT). Whether it is a mobile phone, a tablet computer, a smart watch, a TV, or even a desk lamp, a washing machine, or an electric fan, HarmonyOS can all be carried to achieve barrier-free interconnection of devices.

Therefore, Hongmeng’s vision is not to play with itself, but to hope that more partners will join the Hongmeng camp, expand Hongmeng’s plate, and develop applications based on Hongmeng, so that Huawei is more likely to “continue life” based on Hongmeng .

However, at present, it is unlikely that well-known mobile phone manufacturers will join Hongmeng. After all, they have the latest Android system that is most suitable for users and has the highest share.

Moreover, any slightly famous mobile phone manufacturers will build their own operating systems based on the Android system, which has become a point of competition among major mobile phone brands.

Therefore, Hongmeng is more likely to attract smart home appliance manufacturers that are not consumer electronics products such as mobile phones and tablets. After all, even if it is as strong as the United States and Gree, it is also specialized in the art industry. Traditional home appliance companies make home appliances, but they are not good at software. There is a mature smart home appliance operating system to use, and the supplier has no conflict of interest with himself, so why not do it.

Therefore, these companies are indeed joining the Hongmeng camp at present. For example, Meizu, a major mobile phone manufacturer, has already announced that it will connect its smart home products to Hongmeng, but other people’s mobile phone products still use their own Android.

And the home appliance boss Mei’s announced that all categories are equipped with the Hongmeng operating system.

According to Huawei’s expectations, at least 300 million devices will be equipped with Hongmeng in 2021. Is this number big? Not at all. Because Huawei currently has about 700 million mobile phones on the Internet, and Huawei estimates that 300 million devices will be split, including more than 200 million Huawei devices installed with the Hongmeng system, and the installed capacity of third-party devices (mainly IoT devices) exceeds 100 million units. Therefore, Huawei itself did not expect that there will be a friend’s mobile phone to join the Hongmeng camp.

However, in any case, the birth of Hongmeng has indeed given Huawei’s entire series of hardware products a layer of security at the software level, and will no longer be frightened.

What’s more difficult is the hardware aspect. At the same time as the Hongmeng launch, Huawei officially released a concept image of its next-generation P-series flagship phone, the P50. . .

Yu Chengdong said that the specific launch time of Huawei P50 series products has not yet been determined. Everyone knows the truth. For the current Huawei, it is unknown whether it can be produced in the future and how much it can produce in products involving chips, whether mobile phones, tablets, notebooks or base stations.

After all, even Huawei’s previous generation of mobile phone products are currently out of stock and hard to find. Almost all products in offline stores need to be booked, even if you add money to find popular models of scalpers in stock, it is difficult to buy them.

Huawei’s P50 has been rumored to still use the Kirin 9000 chip used in the P40. It is estimated that the Kirin 9000 produced a total of about 8 million pieces before TSMC cut off the supply to Huawei. If it needs to be distributed to the P40, Mate40, For the P50 and Mate50 (if there are still four mobile phones), the number of chips that the P50 can receive is very limited.

In contrast, Xiaomi’s Xiaomi Mi 11 series, which is the benchmark for Huawei’s high-end mobile phones, sold 3 million units in just four months from January to April 2021. Therefore, even if the P50 will eventually be released, it will be very popular, I don’t need to say. Everyone can guess.

In other words, the creation of P50 is a struggle on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is to keep its existing supply chain and talent team, and the meaning of making money is really not big.

However, in Wang Chenglu’s interview, he mentioned an interesting point: the ecological development of Hongmeng in the past two years is particularly important. At present, we still have hundreds of millions of Huawei mobile phone users. If the old user has a very good experience after upgrading to the Hongmeng system, he may stay (not change the phone for the time being). As long as these two years are taken away, our hardware may come back.

Therefore, Huawei’s current strategy is to use software to support hardware, optimize the software well enough to improve the performance of the existing hardware, and buy enough time for the hardware. The problem of supply failure can be finally resolved through changes in the external situation or the rise of the domestic industrial chain.

Huawei really wants to live another five hundred years.