HongMeng OS may be designed for business solutions, but Chinese Android OEM Huawei will use it for its new smartphone solution, too, allegedly. The Shenzhen-based phone maker, ranked second globally, intends to debut HongMeng OS on Huawei smartphones in Q4 2019.
“The new Huawei phones with the HongMeng system will debut in the market in the fourth quarter, with up to several million units in stock. It is expected that the smartphone will show up along with the Huawei Mate 30 series,” a source familiar with the matter said.
Sources say that the smartphone will cost around 2,000 Yuan ($288.24 USD), enticing customers with a budget-friendly price while trying to win developers over to its upcoming platform. As for HongMeng, it will be unveiled at Huawei’s Developer Conference in Dongguan on August 9th.
The first device Huawei will bless with HongMeng is the Honor smart TVs, followed by Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, autonomous cars, and so on.
The decision of Shenzhen’s Pride to release the smartphone on low-end and mid-end devices pertains to its lack of an app ecosystem as well as a lack of app developers for it. Some weeks ago, Huawei sent emails to Google Play developers to come make apps for its AppGallery app store. Huawei’s request for app developers is a sign that the app store and mobile OS are rather fledgling and new at this point.
The new HongMeng OS has been said to have different ringtones, rebooting animations, and a new (more skeletal, unfortunately) camera app than Huawei has had on Android devices.
Huawei has said that its upcoming HongMeng OS is only for “IoT business solutions,” but the Chinese Android OEM has got to make a move before its Android license revocation is effective on August 19th. Finally, after hiding away the upcoming OS and denying its progress on smartphones, sources familiar with the matter are finally revealing what many Android users have known for weeks: it intends to place HongMeng OS into a smartphone and release it by year’s end.
Huawei had said at one point that HongMeng would only work for IoT devices because it didn’t have enough code to work for smartphones, that it didn’t have enough of an app ecosystem and that it would take years to create the kind of mobile operating system that could work for smartphones.
Huawei arrived at this point because of the US-China Trade War that moved US President Donald Trump to issue an Executive Order against the company in mid-May. Android owner and search engine giant Google followed days later with its Android license revocation. Though the US Government gave Huawei a three-month reprieve, that reprieve is soon to expire in a matter of two weeks.
The US and China have had some negotiation talks, particularly at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan some weeks ago. After that meeting, Trump relaxed the Huawei ban some, allowing high-tech American companies to sell to Huawei again and granting new selling licenses to American companies. These are exceptions to ban rules, and, considering Huawei is banned in the US, Trump’s policy relaxation seems strange and designed to force China to invest more money into the US’s agricultural sector.
The Trump Administration has said that it will approve selling licenses on a case-by-case basis for companies whose selling product(s) isn’t a threat to national security, but the statement itself is vague. No specific products have been verified and high-tech companies are now allowed to sell mobile device components, which Huawei can use to spy on American buyers, to Huawei itself.
HongMeng was developed seven years ago behind closed doors in the event that the US would put Huawei in this unfortunate position because of tensions with Beijing. Huawei has gone on the defensive in recent weeks, claiming that if it leaves Android, Android would lose approximately 800 million users. Of course, Huawei has been counting its users before its HongMeng OS hatched, but considering that Android users don’t mind switching Android OEMs on the fly, it’s highly doubtful that all 800 million users would follow Huawei to HongMeng.
From what can be known about HongMeng, Huawei has been testing it out with Chinese OEMs such as Oppo and Vivo, both of whom have found the OS to be 60-percent faster than Android. Early in the development process, the technical hurdle for HongMeng was compatibility with Google’s Android.