Huawei Hongmeng, big break

Produced by | Tiger Sniff Technology Group

Author | Maruto Mountain

Edit | Wang Yipeng

Header | Visual China

After yesterday, no one will doubt Huawei's determination to cut sides with Android.

On the afternoon of January 18th, Huawei announced that the HarmonyOS NEXT developer preview version is open for application, according to the official note, this version of the HarmonyOS system has a more understandable name - "Galaxy Edition", echoing Yu Chengdong's words at the developer conference four years ago, "No one can extinguish the starry sky".

Compared with the previous generation of HarmonyOS, the system base of HarmonyOS NEXT is developed by Huawei, and only supports the HarmonyOS kernel and HarmonyOS applications, and is no longer compatible with Android applications, nor does it support opening APK files (Android application packages).

At the same time, for application developers, the development of applications of the HarmonyOS system in the future will no longer be as simple as adapting and translating the Android version, and in the future, in addition to iOS and Android, Internet manufacturers need to maintain a third set of application development teams, which will inevitably increase the daily operating costs of enterprises.

Will this be a win-win business for Huawei and Internet manufacturers?

Hongmeng is original, a protracted conspiracy

It's easy to overlook the fact that Huawei is probably the most precise company in China that controls the pace of business.

For the native HarmonyOS, the general concern of the industry is "how many application vendors are willing to follow up"?

At yesterday's HarmonyOS ecosystem launch ceremony, Zhu Yonggang of Huawei Device Cloud answered this question positively, "At present, the first batch of 200+ HarmonyOS native applications have started development, of which 100+ have completed the beta version of HarmonyOS native applications. It is worth mentioning that these more than 200 APPs include most of the head applications used by domestic users on a daily basis.

According to Huawei's estimates, 5000+ HarmonyOS native applications will be developed by the end of this year.

HarmonyOS NEXT's first public debut was at the developer conference in August last year, and the first batch of apps, including WeChat, announced their access to native HarmonyOS in October last year. In other words, in less than half a year, Huawei has completed the initial construction of an independent ecosystem.

Is this amazing efficiency due to Huawei's unparalleled appeal in China? Or is there a deeper reason?

Back in 2019, some clues may be found in this matter. In August of this year, Huawei officially released the HarmonyOS system. If someone said at that time that Huawei was "making a system in PPT", Huawei probably couldn't refute it, because in a conference for developers, Huawei did not show a single line of code examples.

But Huawei does have its own struggles. On May 20 of that year, Google announced that it would cut off Huawei's GMS service, and 10 days after the incident, Huawei announced that the HarmonyOS project was "turning a spare tire into a positive one".

Huawei has a clear positioning for the HarmonyOS system: a distributed OS in all scenarios, which can achieve modular coupling and can be flexibly deployed for different devices.

These indicators fully show that in the construction stage of HarmonyOS's technical base, Huawei did not expect this system to serve smartphones alone, but targeted IoT.

The subtlety of Huawei's strategy lies in the fact that you can always find a foreshadowing for it in an earlier timeline: at Huawei's HiLink conference in March 2019, Yu Chengdong first proposed the "1+8+N" strategy, that is, an all-scenario intelligent (IoT) strategy with mobile phones as the core. This shows that even if Huawei is not subject to external sanctions, it is likely to launch a microkernel operating system that is more suitable for IoT strategies in the future.

Therefore, to a certain extent, the Hongmeng system is the result of the combined force of external and internal factors, and its abruptness is more reflected in time than in its own positioning.

For Huawei, the HarmonyOS system is based on the characteristics of microkernel and distributed OS, and it also does a good job of forcing the competition between mobile phone manufacturers around performance to the level of ecological competition, making up for its own limitations in chips.

Of course, the original Hongmeng is more about solving the problem of whether there is an "alternative system". In 2020, Huawei released Harmony OS 2.0, in which the HarmonyOS system already has the basic framework as a link center between the mobile phone system and the IoT, such as a distributed soft bus, and one-time development and multi-terminal deployment at the application and device development level.

In the following years, the HarmonyOS system entered a stage of steady development, and by the time Harmony OS 4.0 was released, the number of terminal devices equipped with the HarmonyOS system had exceeded 700 million (including IoT devices), and Huawei began to gradually approach the "life and death line" that has been repeatedly mentioned in the past few years.

Huawei has estimated that 16% of the operating system market share is a watershed moment based on the development history of the PC and mobile industries, and beyond this line it can succeed without being eliminated by the market.

Since Huawei is still unable to carry GMS (Google Mobile Service), this "life and death line" refers more specifically to the domestic market, and the latest statistics from the third-party research agency CounterPiont Research show that the current HarmonyOS has reached 13% in China.

数据来源：CounterPoint Research

Speaking of which, we can summarize the key cards that Huawei currently holds in its hands: at the system level, the underlying framework of HarmonyOS has been completed, at the hardware level, the cross-terminal capability of the system has been completely completed, and the number of users has initially met the standard for generating scale effects.

At this point, Huawei can eliminate the underlying code of Android as long as it solves the problems of ecosystem partners and software applications, allowing users to obtain a smoother cross-terminal interaction experience through the microkernel system.

So at the beginning of this year, we saw that the focus of Hongmeng began to shift from "southbound development" to "northbound development".

The software ecology is the real challenge of HarmonyOS

The so-called "southbound development" and "northbound development", the former refers to backward compatibility with various hardware, while the latter refers to the upward provision of interfaces to cultivate more software apps.

At present, "northbound development" is much more difficult, which means that Internet vendors have to build another set of application development teams with real money, and at the same time, if the native HarmonyOS cannot reach the expected level of customer acquisition, the vendors will have to bear additional sunk costs.

Of course, according to the volume of different application vendors, it is also necessary to classify and discuss.

For the head application manufacturers, whether to follow up on the native HarmonyOS is not a question worth pondering. The reason is that application manufacturers are actually in a weak position most of the time in the distribution of interests with mobile phone manufacturers.

One of the most typical examples is the "Huateng War" that occurred at the end of 2020.

At that time, Huawei announced that it would remove a number of Tencent games from the Huawei App Store, and because Tencent was dissatisfied with the excessive payment commission of the Huawei App Store, it unilaterally announced that it would revise the treaty in response. It is interesting to note that the tug-of-war that the industry had expected did not break out, and less than 24 hours later, the seemingly hard-line Tencent side made a compromise.

The reason is also very simple, Tencent's games are difficult to download in third-party channels after bypassing various security warnings of the mobile phone system - the app store controlled by mobile phone manufacturers is the lifeline of Internet manufacturers on the mobile terminal.

Although the current market share of Huawei mobile phones is not as high as in 2020, one point that cannot be ignored is that some models of Honor, which was spun off from Huawei, still retain the option of pushing the HarmonyOS system for users, and according to Canalys statistics, in the third quarter of 2023, Honor's domestic market share reached 18%.

Chinese mainland smartphone shipments and market share in 2023Q3, data source: Canalys

Coupled with Huawei's strong performance after the return of the Mate series, the user groups of the two on the HarmonyOS system are the objects that the head application manufacturers will never give up.

For those midstream application vendors, there is a high probability that they will cautiously follow up with native Hongmeng.

An Internet product manager told Tiger Sniff that if you just do HarmonyOS application development, the cost is not high. "For example, if I have a small team now, it may only take 1-2 months to complete the MVP version (minimum viable product) application that implements 60% functionality. ”

However, there are also cost pressures to consider with subsequent iterations. "If it's a complex app, after completing the development of the first version, I need to implement targeted features, and this process can take up to six months to a year, depending on the evaluation results of data recovery, which means that the long-term cost of the app development team has increased by 50% (compared to the previous iOS and Android versions). ”

In addition, the product manager pointed out that as HarmonyOS Next is a new operating system, the application development team must also consider whether the basic capabilities of the system are complete and whether security vulnerabilities can be fixed in a timely manner, and the related research and development costs may be further increased.

Therefore, for midstream application vendors, it is difficult for them to directly bind their own applications to the native HarmonyOS, and they are likely to take a cautious wait-and-see attitude at the moment.

For small and micro application manufacturers, and even individual developers, even if they want to take the express train of Hongmeng subjectively, the objective conditions are relatively limited. The most direct problem is that the native HarmonyOS development language is based on ArkTS, which is completely different from the Swift language used by iOS engineers and the Java language used by Android engineers, which is a big challenge for the above-mentioned manufacturers and individual developers.

Of course, Huawei is also actively helping application vendors.

At the developer conference in August last year, Huawei announced the launch of the "Hongfei Plan", which is expected to provide 10 billion yuan of financial support for ecological partners in the next three years.

A trillion-dollar business?

According to Huawei's plan, HarmonyOS NEXT will be released as a developer beta version in the second quarter of this year, and a commercial version for consumers will be officially released in the fourth quarter. At that time, how many opportunities will this ecosystem, which Huawei has worked hard for five years, bring to the industry?

The most direct change is that the dividends of mobile app development in the industry will be re-released.

Here we can compare a set of data previously disclosed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: from January to February 2022, the number of mobile app developers in China was 1.042 million, and by May 2023, the number of domestic mobile app developers dropped to 820,000, including 240,000 Android developers and 580,000 Apple developers.

This is not an accidental phenomenon, from a macro point of view, since 2020, the growth rate of mobile app users has entered a stage of continuous decline, and gradually moved towards the stock market, and the market demand for application development engineers is also decreasing.

But at present, the demand for native HarmonyOS from mobile application manufacturers will directly change the status quo of the industry.

According to the data of the Zhaopin recruitment platform, from January to October 2023, the average recruitment salary of Hongmeng engineers will reach 17,573 yuan/month, which is significantly higher than that of similar development engineers.

The monthly salary range of Meituan's Hongmeng infrastructure engineer position is between 40,000 and 60,000 yuan, and the monthly salary range of the front-end architect (Hongmeng direction) position released by JD.com is 40,000-70,000 yuan.

At yesterday's HarmonyOS Ecosystem Kick-off Meeting, Huawei also announced a set of figures: up to now, 305 college students have participated in HarmonyOS activities, 268 companies have participated in HarmonyOS Ecology School, and 380,000+ developers have passed HarmonyOS certification, which will be a reserve force for HarmonyOS application development.

In addition, after the official commercial use of HarmonyOS Next, the Open Harmony system used in automobiles and IoT devices in the past will also be replaced by the former, which is expected to achieve a complete system connection with mobile phones, thus forming an ecological closed loop.

For users, the ecological closed loop means that information security can be ensured and cross-terminal collaboration and interaction experience is better, while for Huawei, the ecological closed loop is convenient for unified upgrades and can also reduce daily O&M costs.

At the same time, the ecological closed loop also means stronger user stickiness, as well as more voice in channel sharing, you can refer to Apple's "walled garden", once the ecological closed loop is formed, Huawei and other Android manufacturers will not be at the same level at all.

"Hongmeng will open a new blue ocean of trillions of industries", at yesterday's Hongmeng ecological kick-off meeting, Xu Chengdong boasted of such a Haikou.

We can't confirm whether the goal of this trillion-dollar industry can be achieved, but in today's mobile phone manufacturers, there can be domestic manufacturers willing to make changes in a "big break", no matter what the result is, it should be encouraged.