"For a manufacturer like us who has started over, 'overtaking in corners' is not enough, we have to 'change lanes and overtake'." On April 17, in the conference room on the 20th floor of Block A of Coolpad Building in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, facing media reporters, Sima Yunrui frankly said that Coolpad wants to be the next generation of operating systems, all of which are no different from entrepreneurship.
The next day, Coolpad announced a strategic cooperation with Tencent Cloud to establish a next-generation operating system lab.
At present, major mainstream mobile phone manufacturers are aiming at the next generation of mobile phone operating systems, before there is a "lack of core and less soul", and then there is hongmeng OS. Coolpad's big move has been misunderstood by many people as a "gimmick".
In the past few years, just like "China Cool Union" is no longer often mentioned, Coolpad's presence in the domestic mobile phone market has gradually weakened.
This turnaround battle is not easy. Market saturation, sluggish mobile phone sales, declining innovation levels... In 2022, the development of the mobile phone market is still in a bottleneck period. The 5G new wave did not arrive as promised, and factors such as the impact of the epidemic and the changes in the international environment caused various problems.
After more than ten years of development, the mobile smartphone market has ushered in a new situation that plagues almost all mobile phone manufacturers. Coolpad, which has returned to the Chinese mobile phone market, faces a more difficult challenge to break the game.
Coolpad can not escape the misunderstanding, but under the question of "doing the operating system is just a gimmick", this veteran manufacturer has done a lot of things.
Since May last year, Coolpad has successively released two smart phone products; Coolpad has also ushered in a new senior management team, among which Sima Yunrui, vice president of Coolpad Group and president of The Internet Center, has many years of experience in cloud computing, big data and Internet business; in terms of funds, in the nearly one year since the return, Coolpad Group has raised more than HK$2.1 billion in the capital market.
For the next generation of operating systems, Coolpad has set up a kernel team to continue to recruit, with a team of more than 200 R&D personnel invested in it, and half of the R&D resources are invested in the underlying architecture of the operating system.
After five years of silence, in the face of the smoke-filled mobile phone market, what does Coolpad want to do? Can it be done?
Split the Red Sea
"Moore's Law hash rate is close to its limit, and the hardware is at the end." Sima Yunrui sighed that whether it is to the 5nm or 3nm process, the computing power is close to the limit.
The classic "Moore's Law" from Intel founder Gordon Moore, which has influenced the mobile phone industry for more than 50 years, tells people that the driving progress of mobile phones lies in the computing power of chips. But now, Moore's Law is no longer considered applicable to the present, and the embarrassing situation of hardware technology stagnating and insufficient innovation is beginning to make people come up with new ideas.
From foreign giants Such as Apple and Google to domestic players, the next generation of operating systems is being placed on the strategic commanding heights. At a time when the hardware-level chip is approaching the limits of physical and economic costs, the software-level operating system needs to make a force.
"Since April and May last year, Coolpad has begun to think about the growth of auxiliary hardware through the optimization of the underlying layer of the core operating system." Sima Yunrui mentioned.
There is no doubt that the "card neck" problem faced by mobile phone manufacturers in the past two years is also an important factor, in addition to the "card neck" of hardware products such as chips, Huawei was banned by Google GMS overseas, which also exposed the situation that domestic manufacturers were restricted in the field of system software, and the solution given by each family in the face of sanctions was just "to do things in qin, to sleep overnight", and did not fundamentally get rid of it.
Based on the research and development of the Nanjing system, Coolpad has set up an operating system kernel team, recruited soldiers, found many research and development talents with artificial intelligence and machine learning backgrounds, and put forward the slogan - "I hope that the operating system will be used faster and faster."
However, for Coolpad, the power of the operating system is not just a long-term layout that focuses on the future. From the perspective of reality such as reinvigorating mobile phone sales, it is a difficult step to change the current situation. As Sima Yunrui mentioned when asked about rebuilding ecology in an interview, at this stage, Coolpad is not re-doing an ecological idea, "We just want to make the mobile phone a little easier to use." ”
To explain this, we must first start with the current dilemma of the mobile phone market. IDC expects smartphone shipments in the Chinese market to be 310 million units in 2022, down 5.5% year-on-year. In fact, the domestic mobile phone market has been weak demand for five consecutive years.
In such an environment, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have long relied on hardware sales profits, and constantly layout high-end mobile phones to improve profit margins, resulting in ASP (average mobile phone price) being continuously pushed up. On the demand side, consumers do not pay for mobile phones that lack innovation but constantly pile up materials, and the supply and demand are unbalanced, and the market further shrinks.
The industry continues to send out the news of "cutting orders". Tianfeng International analyst Guo Mingqi has mentioned that China's major Android mobile phone brands have cut about 170 million orders so far this year (accounting for 20% of the original 2022 global shipping plan).
While many manufacturers are chasing "high-end", Coolpad is quietly carrying out a "marginal revolution" on the overlooked "thousand yuan machine". However, the Red Sea is rolling, it is not easy to stand on its feet, how does Coolpad "split the Red Sea"?
The point of opportunity that Coolpad sees is that for users, the cost of software systems for the improvement of experience is much lower than that of "heap hardware". "We don't care about the so-called high-end, we care about the experience, can we make an affordable experience." Sima Yunrui mentioned.
All along, Apple has rarely had "piles" compared to domestic manufacturers, but the iPhone's camera effect is better than that of similar mobile phones, not only because of chip technology, but also because of the efforts made in system software.
For Coolpad, through the optimization of the system software, it can assist the hardware, optimize the configuration and service of the flagship machine-level system software, and use the 100 yuan, 1000 yuan and 2000 yuan gears, so that the Coolpad mobile phone occupies a leading position in the experience comparison between the same price point and the same chip mobile phone.
In addition, since last year, Coolpad and Tencent Cloud began to cooperate, and recently officially announced a strategic cooperation, the two sides will also set up a joint laboratory to jointly promote the research and development of underlying technologies, explore the landing of the next generation of operating systems, and continue to strengthen the evolution of technical architecture and data storage security.
Although after nearly ten years of development, the mobile phone market is as strong as the cloud, but there is still room for development outside the mainstream vision, through the development of self-built teams, and with Tencent Cloud strong alliance, Coolpad decided to force the operating system. Where does Coolpad's confidence come from? How exactly does it solve consumer pain points?
What kind of mobile phone operating system can stimulate disappointed consumers?
Time turned back to 2016, Coolpad began to lay off employees, shrink, self-help, and gradually disappeared into the mainstream vision.
But in the past five years, while shutting down other businesses, the company has focused on making mobile phones, and its research and development strength has not decreased but increased. At the peak moment, Coolpad innovation led the market direction, such as the common dual-card dual-mode dual standby, which was initially the technical difficulties overcome by Coolpad and ushered in the era of dual-card dual standby blowout. Now that we are fighting again, the research and development strength accumulated over the years is still the shield of Coolpad.
Over the past year, Coolpad has continued to increase its research and development efforts in COOLOS and optimize the operating system kernel. Based on Android, Coolpad developed its own operating system, COOLOS, and iterated on the COOLOS 2.0 application on the two newly launched smartphones.
The problem that bothered Coolpad R&D personnel for a while was how to solve the basic experience that users care about most - smooth, power-saving, and stable. These issues must be addressed from the perspective of the underlying architecture.
In 2021, Coolpad released the first smartphone COOL 20, running score data shows that a 699 yuan mobile phone, the overall fluency of use, performance is much smoother than the same grade, the same hardware equipment of the machine, how is this done?
Coolpad once started with the EROFS file system, which is a read-only file system under the Linux operating system, which can improve the performance of the Android system, and Coolpad optimized and ported it to the COOL 20 Pro mobile phone, compressing the system's 36% footprint and making the phone run more smoothly. Usually, this is what other manufacturers do on flagship machines.
The Coolpad kernel team is also constantly optimizing for core modules such as memory management.
In the past few years, the update of the Android system requires the mobile phone to run more and more memory, which also leads to a series of problems such as larger storage requirements and higher SOC performance requirements.
Wanting to get rid of these dependencies, Coolpad has opened a "big project" - storage to the cloud, computing to the cloud, that is, the os-operating system of the cloud and the end. At present, Coolpad has completed the file system and is relocating photos and libraries to the cloud to optimize the experience.
Another factor that affects the fluency of the system is the runtime runtime problem. At present, most mobile operating systems can only perform Android Runtime, and Coolpad has turned the ecology of mini program ecology and cloud games into a "first-class citizen" of the same level as the Android ecological App, and can directly serve without going through the App.
Sima Yunrui gave an example, if the Runtime of the WeChat Mini Program is separated from Android, the startup speed can be increased by 70%, and the memory occupation can be much smaller.
While speeding up app launch, phones will also become more power-efficient.
In terms of stability, Sima Yunrui mentioned that they found that some three-party applications are easy to flash back on Coolpad mobile phones, in terms of stability, Coolpad still has room to grow, and the key reason for the current stage of restriction is that the small shipment volume leads to the low priority of third-party support for Coolpad. Even so, Coolpad has put a lot of effort into it.
Every day, Coolpad's digital system monitors and records some key indicators, and the indicators related to system stability are: the average number of device application crashes per day, the number of ANR applications that are unresponsive, and the number of restarts. Monitoring, operation, optimization and improvement are almost what R&D teams do every day.
In addition, Coolpad is also trying to find ways to stabilize the ecology, such as hoping to solve problems through cooperation with WeChat Mini Programs.
It is reported that Coolpad monitoring data shows that from COOLOS 1.0 to 2.0, the stability of the system is constantly improving.
Coolpad aimed at the operating system, toppling the first domino, will create a chain reaction.
The beginning of the "revolution" of the mobile phone system in the thousand-yuan machine market may attract more consumers to join the crowd of people who buy Coolpad, and may also become the starting point of the "revival" of Coolpad mobile phones.
Change lanes and overtake and aim for the next decade
In the past few years, major domestic manufacturers have been non-stop, targeting mobile phone operating systems.
Many manufacturers choose the path when developing their own operating systems, focusing on the application and UI level, or committing to creating a closed ecology of the Internet of Everything within the brand.
Coolpad has set its sights on innovative research and development on the underlying architecture, which has also provided new ideas for the industry.
"For a manufacturer like us who has started over, 'overtaking in corners' is not enough, we have to 'change lanes and overtake'." Sima Yunrui said.
So, how to "change lanes and overtake"?
After decades of rapid development, the operating system has transitioned from the PC era of 1.0, which is represented by Microsoft and solving visualization problems, to the mobile era of 2.0, that is, with Android and iOS as representatives, to solve the problem of mobile portability.
In the 3.0 stage, which is also the research and development direction of the next generation of operating systems, Coolpad believes that it is the combination of AI + cloud to solve the bottleneck problem of Moore's Law.
In principle, it is necessary to let the system gradually go to the cloud, and let the system gradually have self-learning ability, that is, "save on the cloud, calculate on the cloud".
In this regard, many users may feel that it is not unfamiliar, the best representative is Apple iCloud to store photos on the cloud, but Coolpad's "save on the cloud" is a wider range of files are on the cloud.
Like the "central kitchen", all dishes are prepared in the center and then transferred to everyone's hands. In the mobile phone scene, users can use these files arbitrarily in the use of APP, mini programs, etc., in fact, the "central kitchen" is playing a role. Coolpad's approach is slightly different, it is to do "pre-made dishes" on the "central kitchen", learn the user's usage habits through AI, put the infrequently used files on the cloud, and put the commonly used files locally, reducing the delay of demand satisfaction and being more user-friendly.
When the storage is all on the cloud, the best place for computation is also on the cloud. AI computing power, can call all cloud files, in order to maximize efficiency, it can also be based on user habits, allocation of common files stored locally, infrequent files stored in the cloud.
In the future, the development of artificial intelligence and the intensive calculation caused by special computers will further improve computing power and save costs. From this background, we can also see the strategic significance of coolpad cooperation with Tencent Cloud. The laboratory jointly established by Coolpad and Tencent Cloud is the research and development of the next generation of operating systems.
Coolpad believes that the mobile phone industry's model of relying on hardware sales has encountered bottlenecks, and by opening up terminal systems and cloud services, it will open a new stage in the industry, and in the future, it can even achieve "hardware is free, and make money by software services".
Coolpad is constantly accumulating its own competitive advantages, perhaps in this process, it can also change the problems such as the reduction of user purchase efforts and "hardware inner volume" faced by domestic mobile phones.
Looking at the world, the operating systems of giants such as Microsoft and Apple are the products of decades of technology accumulation, and in the short term, It is difficult for China's local operating systems to shake the status of "Windows + MacOS", and it is more difficult to share more cakes.
But that doesn't mean Coolpad has to stop. "China's information industry lacks core and soul", as early as 1999, Mr. Xu Guanhua, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out this core problem. Today, more than 20 years later, in the face of the risk of core technology blockade, enterprises must also show the determination to make breakthroughs.
To build the next operating system, the technological breakthrough achieved by Coolpad only achieves the starting point. Regarding the end point and the development of the next decade, Coolpad must continue to promote the progress of research and development, increase investment, and prepare for a long-term battle.