Huawei may unveil Hongmeng OS, consumer business plans at annual conference

The tech world will be watching Huawei this weekend, as thousands of developers and partners gather in the southern city of Dongguan, hopeful for a glimpse of the company’s future consumer business and proprietary operating system amid a US ban that threatens to cut off access to Google’s Android system for good.

Photo credit: Donald Trung Quoc Don (Chữ Hán: 徵國單) / Wikimedia Commons

Huawei, which will be holding its annual developer conference from August 9 to 11 this year, is expected to unveil the proprietary Hongmeng OS for its Honor smart display products on Saturday, the Post reported this week.

The launch will be closely watched by analysts after Huawei was put on a US trade blacklist in May that bans the company from buying American-made technology. With a 90-day reprieve set to run out, Huawei’s consumer business is under the spotlight as it loses access to critical US components, semiconductors, and software, such as Google’s popular Android OS, which powers the millions of smartphones that the Shenzhen-based company ships each year.

“My eyes are on Hongmeng – will it be for phones rather than the internet of things, and can it run Android apps?” said Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices at research firm IDC. “It’s not easy to build up a base of developers unless they have a critical mass of users to cater to.”

“It’s difficult to compete with Android and iOS outside China,” he said, pointing out that should Huawei eventually launch its own smartphone OS, having Tencent Holdings on board to create a compatible version of its WeChat super app would be “absolutely critical,” especially for the domestic market.

“WeChat is such an important part of daily life in China that any OS without it is dead in the water there.”

The developer conference for the world’s No. 2 smartphone vendor is taking place against the backdrop of an escalating trade war between China and the US and a currency stand-off, after China’s central bank allowed the yuan to weaken past the 7.0 threshold against the US dollar for the first time in a decade, prompting the US to call China a “currency manipulator.”

Huawei, which last week reported 23% annual growth in revenue for the first half of 2019, has found itself at the epicenter of the trade war being reliant on a global supply chain and at the forefront of next-generation 5G network technology.

The world’s biggest maker of network equipment also faces a string of US charges, including that it stole trade secrets, violated economic sanctions, and concealed its Iran business dealings via an unofficial subsidiary – all of which it has denied.

After the US trade ban in May, reports emerged that Huawei had been working on its own OS – dubbed Hongmeng – for years. The company acknowledged that it was developing backup systems “but only for use in extenuating circumstances.”

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei clarified in July that the OS was not designed for smartphones and that the firm would need to start building an ecosystem if it loses access to Android.

IDC’s Ma said that if Huawei’s Hongmeng OS were indeed for IoT, then it would be reminiscent of Samsung’s Tizen OS, which is commonly found on smart televisions and smartwatches.

Last year, Huawei shipped 208 million smartphones, half of which went to overseas markets. Losing Android would mean that overseas users would lose access to critical Google services such as YouTube and Gmail, which some analysts have said would send sales off a cliff.