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

Huawei is China – and formerly the world -‘s largest smartphone seller, and has learned an important lesson over the past 18 months: the company cannot rely on the US supply chain. In 2019, the U.S. government banned U.S. exports to Huawei, which cut off the company from access to most chip and software vendors. It is difficult to build a phone without access to key components and applications. Huawei’s latest Q4 2020 numbers show that phone sales are falling in free fall and are 42% higher than a year ago.

As a result, Huawei wants independence from the global smartphone supply chain. While hardware independence is something the business needs to work on, Huawei also needs to get rid of Google’s software. As many companies have tried before, Huawei hopes to make an Android killer.

The company’s attempt at an internal operating system is called ‘HarmonyOS’ (also known as ‘HongmengOS’ in China). ‘Version 2’ was released in December, bringing beta operating system 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 all tried and failed?

Hearing Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original creation of its own – a challenging act that will unleash the influence of American software. Huawei’s OS announcement in 2019 received huge, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS “an Android competitor,” and Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS was “completely different from Android and iOS.” Huawei president of consumer software, Wang Chenglu, repeated these allegations just last month, saying (by translation): “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS.”

This makes HarmonyOS sound super interesting. Of course we had to dive deep.

After accessing HarmonyOS through a very intrusive login process, turning on the SDK and the emulator and reviewing the developer documents, I can not come to any other conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way Huawei describes the operating system to the press and in developer documents does not seem to have much to do with what the company is actually shipping. The developer documents appear almost purposefully to confuse the reader; any piece of actual shipping code on which you hold a magnifying glass looks like Android without major changes.

The phrase “fake it until you make it” is often given as motivational advice, but I have never seen it apply to the development of an operating system. If you’ve already seen a modern Huawei Android phone, HarmonyOS is largely the same … with a few strings changed. While not much new can be seen, we can at least analyze HarmonyOS and debunk some of Huawei’s claims about its ‘brand new’ operating system.

But first – a two-day background test ?!

Before we dive into HarmonyOS, we really need to do it gain HarmonyOS, which is an incredible problem. Some Huawei Android phones like the P40 Pro could presumably be switched to HarmonyOS through a closed beta. However, it is limited to China. For me, getting my passport means getting HarmonyOS.

For comparison, let’s first discuss how other vendors operate their operating system SDKs. For Android, Google ‘Android SDK’ from a computer, click on the first link and press the download button. Apple requires developers to own 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, however, Huawei must pass a two-day background study. They even want a photo of your passport!

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

Huawei’s documents state 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 does it take two days?

Even if you try to skip the awful Huawei login process and “pirate” the Harmony SDK by downloading it from somewhere else, the SDK will not run the emulator before logging in with an account that has passed the two-day background check do not have .

Can you imagine what a potential HarmonyOS developer would think if they got to this step? If you are an established developer in an app ecosystem, it is normal for the ecosystem owner to collect identifying and financial information. You probably want a developer to be able to charge money for their app, which means you have to be able to transfer money to a bank account, and the owner of the ecosystem can be responsible for tax collection. At the moment we are miles away out of that situation with HarmonyOS. At this point, which is just downloading the SDK for the first time, your typical downloader will be a curious developer just exploring Huawei’s operating system. (Signing up for Merchant Service is actually a very different Huawei process.)

Curious

It’s supposed to be a brand new operating system, and Huawei’s position at this point will usually be open to potential developers. Google’s anonymous one – click download for the Android SDK on Windows, Mac and Linux is the model companies need to emulate. Huawei makes it as difficult as possible instead, and it’s easy to imagine a potential developer weakening the ridiculous and intrusive download process, closing the tab, and going back to Android and iOS development. This is the worst first impression of an operating system I have ever seen. As a developer, you have to wonder if Huawei will always be so difficult to work with in the future.

That said, I did it all.

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

Let us now look at what we have gained after all these efforts.