Huawei is facing bad times in its history. Due to the trade war between the United States and China, the company has to find ways to solve the problem related to Google's refusal to cooperate with it. Earlier, US President Donald Trump signed a decree on including Huawei in the blacklist of companies with which you should not cooperate. After a couple of days, many American companies refused to cooperate, including Google – it no longer provides its own services to the Chinese Huawei, which led to the fact that new smartphones Huawei work without services giant. A good example would be Huawei Mate 30, which, although it turned out to be of high quality, is of little interest to anyone without popular applications.
Huawei invests in App Gallery app development
Huawei even before the ban, she worked on the App Gallery store, trying to somehow fill it with quality applications. She succeeded a little, the App Gallery already includes tens of thousands of applications, but the problem is that there are not many popular solutions like Instagram there yet.
To somehow improve its state of affairs in the field of applications, the company held a developer day in London, where it announced that it will invest $ 26 million in developing applications for the App Gallery. The company promises to support financially every developer who decides to help her in these difficult times. The truth is not yet entirely clear, we are talking only about British developers or all, because surely in Russia there will be many who want to develop something with the confidence that the project will be financially supported by itself Huawei.
The head Huawei noted a number of advantages of the App Gallery, including a two-fold tax reduction compared to Google Play and the App Store (15% versus 30%). In addition, he stressed that developers will be able to advertise their applications on the smartphone desktop Huawei. It is not yet clear what this means, because advertising on the desktop can scare away buyers of the company's phones.
Harmony OS was also mentioned. Huawei has not yet announced a date, however, according to rumors, the first devices based on this operating system will go on sale in the second quarter of this year. The system was presented back in August last year at Huawei Developers Conference 2019. It was announced at the conference that one of the features of Harmony OS will be the use of a microkernel. This will allow you to make the kernel code smaller, and divide the necessary functionality into modules. Thus, it will be possible to use the necessary modules on different devices, it will make the system cleaner, lighter and more responsive. The kernel code Linux in Android has 20 million lines, of which only 8% are used by the system. In this case, the code itself Android occupies 100 million lines. The modular HarmonyOS system will allow it to be used in smart watches and bulbs, as well as in ordinary PCs and phones. It is a new generation operating system. In addition, Harmony is compatible with Android – apps.
Earlier we wrote that Huawei is considered to be survival as our main goal in 2020. The decline in growth rates in a letter to the company's employees was announced by the chairman Huawei Eric Xu. The company plans to cut its staff by 10%, laying off the most ineffective. In addition, previously Huawei CEO Ren Zhenfei told CNN that the company will not revert to Android after switching to Harmony OS. And not so long ago Huawei signed an agreement with the Dutch TomTom, which deals with navigation systems. The Chinese plan to use maps and other TomTom services as a replacement for Google Maps. My colleague Ivan Kuznetsov noted that this decision is probably temporary, because earlier Huawei she worked with Yandex on this issue.
On January 17 Huawei in Russia began to update smartphones to EMUI 10. The flagship devices will be the first to receive updates, and all of them will not lose Google services, so smartphone owners Huawei should not worry.
The attempt Huawei to provide itself with its own software is understandable, she was simply left with no choice. Of course, Silicon Valley is a completely different level and culture of application development, but where are the guarantees that this particular situation will not allow Huawei to concentrate more on software development, which will make it even stronger and more influential in the future? We propose to discuss these issues in Telegram.