Huawei's Xu Zhijun: Building a HarmonyOS native application ecosystem is the most critical thing in 2024

21st Century Business Herald reporter Ni Yuqing reported from Shenzhen

From April 17th to April 19th, the Huawei Analyst Conference was held in Shenzhen as scheduled, with HarmonyOS and intelligence being the two key words.

At the meeting, Xu Zhijun, Vice Chairman and Rotating Chairman of Huawei, elaborated on the trend of 2024 and Huawei's layout.

Xu Zhijun believes that 5G-A will be commercialized on a large scale in 2024, secondly, large models are accelerating the technological breakthrough and application development of AI, at the same time, the proportion of clean energy power generation continues to increase, photovoltaic and wind power have accelerated to become the main energy sources, in addition, the new energy vehicle industry will continue to develop rapidly, and from pure electric to intelligent.

Based on the above judgments, Huawei has also defined key strategic measures for 2024, including winning by quality, optimizing the industry portfolio, building an ecosystem, building solar and wind storage generators, and promoting comprehensive intelligence.

Talking about the ecosystem, Xu Zhijun said that the ecosystem is very important to Huawei's industrial development, and Huawei will make strong strategic investments in the ecosystem in 2024 and the next five years, "The first is to build a HarmonyOS native application ecosystem, which is the most critical thing for Huawei in 2024." ”

At the same time, he further talked in the interview: "The construction of the HarmonyOS ecosystem is indeed very challenging. We expect the Mate70 to be launched with a 'pureblood' HarmonyOS when it goes on sale this year, which is also the goal we are working towards." ”

More than 4,000 applications have been explicitly migrated to HarmonyOS

In 2024, HarmonyOS will enter a moment of qualitative change, and the "pureblooded" HarmonyOS Galaxy version that is not compatible with Android will be launched soon. At this point, HarmonyOS has entered the second stage of development, and the truly independent HarmonyOS ecology has set sail.

Since the beginning of this year, the application circle that has joined HarmonyOS has expanded rapidly, and more than 4,000 applications have joined the HarmonyOS ecosystem in early April, of which more than 600 applications in Guangdong Province have reached cooperation. On April 18, at the HarmonyOS Native Application Cooperation and Exchange Promotion Conference, 10 companies signed contracts with Huawei to reach HarmonyOS cooperation, and 11 companies announced the launch of HarmonyOS native application development.

Among them, One Shenzhen, Straight News, Bee Assistant, Express 100, Cloud Home, Kaisi, Caixun Co., Ltd., Kadis, Zhumang Partner, Yika, Easy Refueling, etc., signed contracts with Huawei and reached a cooperation intention with Hongmeng. Shenzhen Tong, Huohuotu, China Southern Asset Management, Lanling KK, Miyi, Private Placement, Caregiver, Xiaohua Wallet, Gelonghui, Leyoujia, China Merchants Cigna and other applications announced the launch of HarmonyOS native application development.

It can be seen that Hongmeng is penetrating more subdivisions. Xu Zhijun said that the HarmonyOS has opened up all terminals based on the Internet of Things operating system from the beginning, from the Internet of Things terminal to the mobile terminal, to the home terminal, including notebooks, PCs, etc., which can be fully covered by one operating system. In the past, the HarmonyOS was more adaptable to various terminal devices in the south, but in the northbound applications, it still shared the Android application ecosystem.

Huawei hopes to migrate 5,000 applications that are used on smartphones for more than 99% of the time in the Chinese market to the HarmonyOS native operating system in 2024, truly unifying the operating system and application ecosystem.

Of the more than 5,000 applications, more than 4,000 have defined migration plans, and less than 1,000 applications are being communicated. Xu Zhijun also stated a further goal at the meeting: "In the future, it will increase from 5,000 to 1 million." ”

"The migration effort is enormous. When we migrate these 5,000 apps and thousands of other apps from the Android ecosystem to the HarmonyOS system, our HarmonyOS will truly be built and truly become the third mobile operating system in the world in addition to Apple iOS and Google Android. We first build a HarmonyOS operation application ecology based on the Chinese market, and promote it country by country in the future, and gradually promote it to the world. Xu Zhijun said.

In addition, he once again said that building the HarmonyOS was not Huawei's strategy before, but was forced to do it, since it was launched, it must be done well, "Since we can't use Google's GMS, we can't use Google Play, so we can only wait until the HarmonyOS ecosystem is built to develop." Based on this situation, we will first develop in the Chinese market, and then gradually go overseas, and when we go overseas, we will also promote it one country at a time. ”

How intelligence can go further

In terms of ecosystem, in addition to HarmonyOS, Huawei is also building the Kunpeng and Ascend ecosystems, which are important computing infrastructures.

In terms of the Kunpeng ecosystem, Xu Zhijun said that in 2019, Huawei open-sourced the general-purpose computing operating system openEuler, and then in 2020, it open-sourced the database openGauss. After several years of hard work, more than 75% of the application software in China has been able to run on the Kunpeng processor, and after the efforts of the next few years, it is expected to promote all the application software in China to run on both the x86 processor and the Kunpeng processor.

The Ascend ecosystem is the key to Huawei's AI development. "Over the years, Huawei has been building the Ascend ecosystem around Ascend processors, CANN, and MindSpore, and has made great progress with the efforts of the entire industry. We hope that in the future, based on CANN and MindSpore, enterprises and developers will be able to train all large models and complete all inference work. Xu Zhijun said.

At the same time, for all developers in the Kunpeng, Ascend, and HarmonyOS ecosystems, Huawei will build a unified developer platform based on HUAWEI CLOUD, allowing developers to move freely across the three ecosystems. In Xu's view, "based on the construction of these ecosystems, we will be able to provide a second option for the world's computing field, and at the same time provide the world with a third mobile operating system." ”

In addition to the ecosystem, intelligence has been a theme that has run through Huawei's analyst conferences in recent years. Under the wave of AI, Xu Zhijun summarized three directions for how to seize the strategic opportunity of intelligence and promote comprehensive intelligence.

The first is to use AI and large models to enhance product competitiveness, and at the same time create new products and solutions, including using Ascend Cloud Services and Pangu large models to enable industry intelligence, and create autonomous driving solutions.

In 2023, Huawei launched Pangu Model 3.0 and built AI-native infrastructure. Xu Zhijun said that the next step is to continue to deepen the industry through the Pangu large model service to help customers train their own large models, and at the same time, continue to build the Ascend cloud service to provide AI computing services for all walks of life and support inclusive large model training and inference.

Autonomous driving is also an important area for Huawei to start investing in AI, because the goal of autonomous driving is autonomous driving, which is one of the most challenging scenarios for AI applications. Huawei's starting point is to develop the L4 architecture and L4 goals, and then adapt to the intelligent driving configuration requirements of different models.

Xu Zhijun also talked about the controversy over lidar, "Our research believes that the three sensors of vision camera, millimeter-wave radar, and lidar have their own advantages and disadvantages, and there is no one sensor that can solve all the problems. Lidar brings significant safety benefits, especially on AEB, where it is much more valuable than other sensors. Therefore, we propose a fusion perception solution, which fully combines lidar, millimeter-wave radar, cameras, etc., and is more conducive to the realization of the goal of autonomous driving in the future by fusing multiple sensors together. At the same time, we expect to achieve the cost of lidar to $200 in the future, so as to solve the cost concerns. ”

In addition to AI products and solutions, Huawei will also introduce AI into internal management to continuously improve operational efficiency and user experience, and will continue to invest in basic AI research to promote continuous AI innovation.

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