Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development

Huawei is China’s – and previously the world’s largest smartphone supplier – and in the past 18 months it has learned an important lesson: the company cannot rely on the US supply chain. In 2019, the US government banned US exports to Huawei, preventing the company from accessing most chip and software vendors. Building a phone is difficult without access to important parts and apps. Huawei’s latest Q4 2020 figures show phone sales in freefall, down 42 percent year-on-year.

That’s why Huawei wants independence from the global smartphone supply chain. While hardware independence is something the company needs to work on, Huawei also needs to break away from Google’s software. So, as many companies have tried before, Huawei is hoping to make it an Android killer.

The company’s attempt to use an internal operating system is called “HarmonyOS” (also known as “HongmengOS” in China). “Version 2” was released in December, bringing “beta” smartphone support to the operating system for the first time. Can Huawei succeed where Windows Phone, Blackberry 10, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, Symbian, MeeGo, WebOS and Samsung’s Tizen have all tried and failed?

To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation – a challenging act that will let the company break from the influence of US software. Huawei’s 2019 OS announcement got big, rousing headlines in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS “a rival to Android,” and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the retailer that HarmonyOS is “totally different from Android and iOS.” Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu echoed these claims last month, saying (via translation), “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS.”

That makes HarmonyOS super interesting. Of course we had to take a deep dive.

After accessing HarmonyOS through an extremely invasive login process, booting up the SDK and emulator, and looking at the developer docs, I can’t come to another conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way Huawei describes the operating system to the press and in developer documents doesn’t seem to have much to do with what the company actually ships. The developer documents seem written almost on purpose to confuse the reader; every bit of actual shipping code that you hold a magnifying glass to will look like Android with no major changes.

The phrase “pretend to make it” is often given as motivational advice, but I’ve never applied it to OS development before. If you’ve ever seen a modern Huawei Android phone, HarmonyOS is much the same … with a few changed strings. So while there isn’t much new to see, we can at least dissect HarmonyOS and debunk some of Huawei’s claims about its “brand new” operating system.

But first – a two-day background check ?!

Before we dive into HarmonyOS, we really need to do that to get HarmonyOS, which is an incredible hassle. Presumably some Huawei Android phones like the P40 Pro can be switched to HarmonyOS via some kind of closed beta. However, this is limited to China. For me, getting HarmonyOS meant finding my passport.

For comparison, let’s first look at how other vendors offer their OS SDKs. For Android: your Google “Android SDK” from a desktop computer, click the first link and hit the download button. Apple requires developers to have a Mac for the iOS SDK, but from there it’s just a simple trip to the App Store to download Xcode.

Before you can try Harmony OS, Huawei requires that you pass a two-day background check. They even want a photo of your passport!

Huawei requires that you go to Huawei.com, create an account, and then sign up as a developer by providing “Identity Verification”. This means that you give Huawei your name, address, email address, phone number and photos of your ID (driver’s license or passport) and a photo of a credit card. You will then have to wait one or two business days while someone at Huawei manually “reviews” your application. Huawei helpfully notes that it won’t charge your credit card.

Huawei’s documents say that “the ID card, passport, driver’s license and bank card are used to verify and match your identity information.” OK, but why? Why does Huawei want to know everything about me first? And why is that so two days?

Even if you try to skip Huawei’s terrible login process and ‘pirate’ the Harmony SDK by downloading it elsewhere, the SDK will not run the emulator until you log in with an account that has passed the 2-day background check. .

Can you imagine what a potential HarmonyOS developer will think when they get to this step? If you are an established developer in an app ecosystem, it is normal for the owner of the ecosystem to collect some identifying and financial information. You probably want a developer to be able to charge for their app, which means that you should be able to transfer money to a bank account and the ecosystem owner may be responsible for collecting taxes. But at the moment we are miles away from that situation with HarmonyOS. At this point, just downloading the SDK for the first time, your typical downloader will be a nosy developer just starting to research Huawei’s operating system. (Signing up for ‘Merchant Service’ is actually a completely different Huawei process.)

Curious

This is supposed to be a brand new OS, and Huawei’s position on this point would usually be one of openness to potential developers. Google’s anonymous one-click download for the Android SDK, on ​​Windows, Mac, and Linux, is the model businesses should emulate. Huawei instead makes this as difficult as possible, and it’s easy to imagine a potential developer turning away from the ridiculous and intrusive download process, closing the tab, and going back to Android and iOS development. It’s the worst first impression of an operating system I’ve ever seen. As a developer, you have to ask yourself if Huawei will always be that difficult to work with in the future.

That being said, I’ve done all of this.

In the spirit of taking one for the team, I embarrassedly sent Huawei a photo of my passport and credit card. My information probably went God-knows-where in China; it felt like a violation, and you were welcome. After two days of waiting, my social credit score was apparently high enough to access Huawei’s precious operating system. (Hopefully Beijing doesn’t have a “file” on me now.)

Now let’s see what we got after all this effort.