Building an ecosystem is harder than building a system.

Article | Huashangtaolue Zhang Jingbo

How difficult is it to build a mobile operating system ecosystem?

After the rise of mobile internet in 2007, many operating systems were launched globally, including giants like Microsoft, Samsung, and Nokia.

However, only Android and iOS remain today.

In China, almost no terminal operating system has achieved large-scale commercialization. The reason is that the ecosystem is not mature.

Today, native HarmonyOS is breaking this pattern.

[Native HarmonyOS Officially Blows the Trumpet for Commercialization]

On September 25, 2024, after a decade of development, HarmonyOS reached a crucial moment.

On this day, Huawei held a HarmonyOS Thousand Sails Battle Mobilization Conference at its Bantian base in Shenzhen.

Leading Chinese internet companies, including Baidu, Bilibili, DingTalk, JD.com, Kuaishou, Meituan, Alipay, Tencent, NetEase, and Weibo, were all present.

These industry giants, even competitors, put aside their differences and sat together for a common goal:

To build China's own mobile app ecosystem and give China's information industry its own roots!

This is a significant day in China's operating system history, marking the acceleration of HarmonyOS's journey towards full commercialization and the official start of the decisive battle.

The day before, on September 24, Yu Chengdong, Huawei's Executive Director, Chairman of the Terminal Business, and Chairman of the Intelligent Automobile Solutions BU, announced at Huawei's Autumn Full-Scene New Product Launch Conference:

'HarmonyOS NEXT will officially enter public beta on October 8.'

Unlike previous versions of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT will no longer be compatible with Android.

This means that HarmonyOS will independently build its own ecosystem, becoming a true native HarmonyOS. People familiar with the industry know that this path is akin to climbing the north face of Mount Everest.

The reason HarmonyOS chose this difficult path, according to Huawei's Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun, is that:

'Only by having its own ecosystem can HarmonyOS be a true mobile operating system, enabling the coordination of apps, operating systems, and chips to continuously improve user experience and security.'

For this day, millions of HarmonyOS developers and partners embarked on a day-and-night journey.

They fully committed themselves, working around the clock, and covered more ground in one year than foreign operating system ecosystems had in over a decade, creating the HarmonyOS speed.

During this period, the number of native HarmonyOS apps grew significantly.

From a spark a year ago to over 10,000 apps and meta-services listed on the HarmonyOS NEXT App Market, native HarmonyOS apps have ignited a prairie fire.

These apps cover 18 major categories, from mainstream to niche apps, satisfying 99.9% of user usage time.

The continuous enrichment of apps has driven rapid progress in the construction of the HarmonyOS ecosystem.

For app developers accustomed to traditional operating systems, native HarmonyOS provides a new experience and more possibilities.

At the HarmonyOS Thousand Sails Battle Mobilization Conference, DingTalk President Ye Jun said:

'We hope to have the opportunity to deconstruct DingTalk and rebuild it from scratch based on native HarmonyOS, hoping to create a different DingTalk.'

As an office software giant, WPS is also firmly partnering with native HarmonyOS to reinvent the full-scenario office experience through innovation.

Not only in the corporate world but also in the past year, from universities, financial institutions to local governments, various sectors of society have actively embraced native HarmonyOS apps.

Peking University completed the core version of its HarmonyOS native app in two months, and leading financial institutions such as ICBC and CCB initiated the development of their office app's HarmonyOS native version.

Provinces and cities across the country, including Shanghai, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and Shandong, are also actively promoting the development of government and people's livelihood apps and provincial media's HarmonyOS native apps.

Shenzhen has even released a 2024 action plan specifically to support the development of open-source HarmonyOS native apps.

The current native HarmonyOS ecosystem has gained momentum and is galloping forward.

[The Next-Generation Operating System, Made in China]

Behind the widespread embrace of the HarmonyOS ecosystem lies trust and anticipation for the next-generation operating system.

Since the birth of Microsoft's DOS system, the global consumer electronics industry has given birth to many operating systems amidst the PC and mobile internet eras.

From DOS/Windows in the PC era to Android and iOS in the mobile internet era, these operating systems have driven continuous upgrades in global users' consumer terminal experiences but also share a common drawback:

The systems are fragmented.

This means that different systems need to be developed for different devices, such as PCs, mobile phones, tablets, and wearables, and it is difficult to interconnect them to achieve data and resource sharing.

In the PC and mobile internet eras, the relatively limited types of devices had a less significant impact on consumer experience.

However, with the advent of the Internet of Everything era, the types of terminal devices have surged, and the number of connections has increased tenfold compared to the mobile internet era, reaching hundreds of billions.

At this point, the drawbacks of traditional operating systems are evident, and the fragmentation between devices severely impacts the user experience.

Huawei noticed this phenomenon early on and initiated the development of the next-generation operating system in 2015. After four years of preparation, it officially launched HarmonyOS in August 2019.

It is the first operating system in history to bridge hardware, scenarios, support diverse interactions, and enable free flow.

To achieve this, Huawei has made significant innovations in microkernels and distributed technologies.

Unlike Android and iOS, which use a macrokernel, HarmonyOS employs a microkernel that can be deployed on different terminal devices and achieves full-scenario interconnection, resource sharing, and seamless service flow through distributed multi-device collaboration technology.

In addition to the Internet of Everything, artificial intelligence technology, represented by large AI models, has also exploded in recent years.

As a brand-new operating system without any historical baggage, HarmonyOS can start with a clean slate, reconstructing the operating system with AI, and achieving brand-new native intelligence from the bottom kernel to system applications. For example, based on the Pangu large model, HarmonyOS NEXT upgrades Xiaoyi to Xiaoyi Intelligence, which can accurately recognize user intentions and perform more complex operations according to different scenarios, providing users with full-scenario, personalized services.

These leading advantages are the key to HarmonyOS NEXT's success.

For the past 30 years, terminal operating systems have been dominated by the West.

Technological advancements have provided China with an opportunity to overtake. In the full-scenario era of the Internet of Everything, Huawei seized this historic opportunity and rewrote history.

Originally intended as a backup, HarmonyOS was forced into official commercialization due to extreme external pressure.

'If we're going to do it, we have to do it right. There is no retreat, only the path to victory. We have no choice but to forge ahead without hesitation.'

From its internal initiation in 2015 to the present, HarmonyOS has come a long way over ten years, embodying the dedication of Huawei and its partners and developers over thousands of days and nights.

It is a long march in China's technological history, creating the next-generation operating system while providing a second option for the world.

[HarmonyOS Ecosystem: A Thousand-Mile Sprint for Mutual Prosperity]

Building an operating system is just the first step.

Global technology industry history tells us that building a brand-new app ecosystem is even more challenging than developing the underlying technology for an operating system.

After the rise of the mobile internet in 2007, many operating systems were launched globally, including giants like Microsoft, Samsung, and Nokia.

However, only Android and iOS remain today.

There are many reasons for the failures of Microsoft, Samsung, and Nokia in mobile operating systems, but they all share a common characteristic: ecosystem failure!

Take Nokia as an example; due to high application development thresholds and a closed ecosystem, Symbian failed to build a thriving mobile app ecosystem and ultimately lost the competition.

An ecosystem is not a solo act but a collective endeavor, as evidenced by the rivalry between Symbian and Android/iOS.

Past experiences serve as lessons for the future.

From its inception, the HarmonyOS system has adhered to the altruistic principle of benefiting developers and partners first.

To this end, Huawei has consistently invested over 6 billion yuan annually to support and encourage innovation among HarmonyOS developers. At the same time, it has jointly cultivated HarmonyOS talents with the industry and universities, adding 100,000 new HarmonyOS developers each month.

Currently, over 4,300 enterprises have participated in the HarmonyOS Ecosystem Academy, 305 universities have offered HarmonyOS courses, and the total number of registered developers in the Huawei Developer Alliance exceeds 6.75 million.

At the HarmonyOS Thousand Sails Battle Mobilization Conference, Yu Chengdong, Huawei's Executive Director, Chairman of the Terminal Business, and Chairman of the Intelligent Automobile Solutions BU, said:

'HarmonyOS cannot be achieved by Huawei alone. Only by relying on partners from various industries can we achieve the true prosperity of the HarmonyOS ecosystem.'

By letting developers win first, the concept of a mutually beneficial HarmonyOS ecosystem has successfully united forces from all sectors of society.

Since its beta launch for developers and pioneer users on June 21, 2024, HarmonyOS NEXT has been updated six times, receiving over 1 million feedback suggestions.

Numerous leading app developers and owners have actively invested over the past year.

WPS completed cross-platform migration of 40 million lines of code in one year, while JD.com, Meituan, Alipay, and others invested heavily in adaptation… Many developers and partners have joined the fray.

They are attracted not only by the over 900 million devices in the HarmonyOS ecosystem but also by the technological advancement of native HarmonyOS.

After adapting to native HarmonyOS, the JD.com app achieved extremely high levels of experience and fluency, with many features even surpassing the original version.

Features such as full-scenario and native intelligence make HarmonyOS NEXT offer more possibilities than traditional operating systems.

It presents unprecedented new scenarios and opportunities to various industries, unleashing enormous technological and business model dividends, accelerating industrial upgrading.

Take Alipay and DingTalk as examples.

Based on the AI capabilities of the HarmonyOS NEXT intent framework, their services are easier to understand and access, enabling precise and efficient service distribution and scheduling for users.

In daily life scenarios, Alipay can proactively provide one-stop service portfolio suggestions in Xiaoyi's scenario suggestion cards based on the user's location.

In office scenarios, simply telling Xiaoyi a command allows the intent framework to understand the user's intention, directly locate contacts in DingTalk, and initiate a DingTalk meeting.

The efficient matching of user intentions and services not only enhances the user experience but also provides developers with new growth points for expanding traffic and application scenarios. These technological and business model dividends are attracting more and more developers to join.""'Joining the HarmonyOS ecosystem earlier will allow you to share early dividends.'

As a long-term partner of Huawei, 360 Group has fully embraced the HarmonyOS ecosystem across its entire product line, and its founder Zhou Hongyi bluntly stated, 'It's too late if you don't join now!'

Today, HarmonyOS has become the world's third-largest mobile operating system and China's second-largest.

Amidst increasingly fierce global technological competition, the growth of HarmonyOS has given China's information technology industry its own roots and contributed to the country's technological self-reliance, long-term industrial development, and information industry security.

Looking to the future, native HarmonyOS is not positioned to compete with rival ecosystems or simply replace competitors but to provide better experiences for consumers in the full-scenario era of the Internet of Everything.

To achieve this goal, we must first take the bold step of commercialization.

According to the plan, native HarmonyOS will officially enter commercialization in the fourth quarter of 2024. This means that in the coming months, Huawei will join hands with partners and developers to make a final all-out sprint.

Monopolies will eventually be broken. From the blooming HarmonyOS flower to various small and large flowers competing to bloom, and eventually to a world filled with 'Chinese flowers,' a new era of profusion is dawning.

-END-

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