In the first year of the "pure-blood" Hongmeng, how did the ecological map go? Titanium Media Focus

Titanium Media APP

2024-05-18 09:52Published on the official account of Beijing Titanium Media APP

"Building a HarmonyOS native application ecosystem is the most critical thing for Huawei in 2024."

At the 2024 Huawei Analyst Conference, Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun said that Huawei hopes to use 5,000 applications on smartphones for more than 99% of the time in the Chinese market in 2024, and fully migrate them to the HarmonyOS native operating system, so as to truly realize the unification of the operating system and application ecosystem.

According to Xu Zhijun, "Huawei has managed 5,000 (HarmonyOS native applications) by itself, and the other 1 million applications, and hopes that the whole society will develop them together." At the same time, more than 4,000 of the 5,000 applications have a clear migration plan, and less than 1,000 applications are being communicated.

In the first year of the "pure-blood" Hongmeng, how did the ecological map go? Titanium Media Focus

Since the birth of HarmonyOS in 2019, Huawei has been trying to open up the capabilities of the HarmonyOS ecosystem. In 2023, with the return of the Mate 60 series of mobile phones, the process of building a native operating system for HarmonyOS will be significantly accelerated, and it will be announced that the HarmonyOS native application will be fully launched.

A front-end developer told the Titanium Media APP that the future growth space of Huawei's mobile phones, tablets and other terminal devices is actually the most important source of development power. "No one can ignore the popularity of the Huawei Mate 60 series in 2023. With Huawei's return to the end market, the incremental space it can bring to application vendors is considerable. This will also allow developers to take the initiative to join the ecosystem. ”

According to Huawei's plan, when the Mate70 series mobile phones are sold in 2024, a "pureblood" version of HarmonyOS will also be launched. This means that this year will be the "first battle year" for HarmonyOS to completely break away from Android. Now, how is the ecological map of Hongmeng fighting?

Tencent is the most important piece of the puzzle

To build a native mobile phone operating system from 0 to 1, the prosperity of the native application ecosystem is the key to the success or failure of the system.

Judging from the information disclosed so far, from October 2023 to January 2024, Huawei plans to complete the landing of the top 200+ ranked applications in mobile phone applications into the HarmonyOS native system. According to Huawei's calculations, they together account for 90% of mobile phone users' time spent on mobile phones.

From January to June 2024, Huawei is trying to promote the implementation of the top 5,000 applications in addition to the 200 national applications. 200 national-level apps and about 4,800 top apps account for 99% of the time spent by the vast majority of mobile phone users.

In the second phase of the advancement, a noticeable change is the deepening of the involvement of local government departments.

For example, on March 2, the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology and the Shenzhen Municipal Government Service and Data Administration jointly issued the "Shenzhen 2024 Action Plan for Supporting the Development of Open Source HarmonyOS Native Applications". Agglomeration area.

At the same time, government service platforms in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Chongqing, Hubei, Guangxi and other places, as well as local banks and livelihood enterprises, have announced the start of the development of HarmonyOS native applications.

And the most important thing is that in this "decisive battle" of Hongmeng's native application, Tencent, which has always been secretive about cooperation, has also made new changes.

On April 24, Tencent released the latest version 1.3.5 of the MMKV component, announcing that it officially supports HarmonyOS NEXT for the first time. MMKV is a key-value general open-source component based on mmap memory mapping, and the underlying serialization/deserialization is implemented by protobuf, which has the advantages of high performance and strong stability. From 2015 to the present, the MMKV component has been used on WeChat.

According to Tencent's financial report, the combined number of monthly active accounts of WeChat and WeChat will further increase to 1.343 billion in 2023. For the HarmonyOS ecosystem, whether Tencent's apps, which have more than 1 billion users, join the development of HarmonyOS native applications is one of the decisive factors for its success or failure.

In the future, Huawei's plan is to fill the remaining 1% on the HarmonyOS native operating system, increasing from 5,000 native apps to 1 million. Of course, this goal needs to be achieved step by step after the HarmonyOS native system is launched.

Terminal sales are gradually rising

The entry of native applications is the foundation for the establishment of the HarmonyOS system; The number of terminal connections is the confidence of HarmonyOS to challenge iOS and Android.

According to a report released by market analyst Canalys, in the first quarter of 2024, the smartphone market in Chinese mainland will recover for the first time in two years, with shipments unchanged from the same period last year, reaching 67.7 million units. Among them, Huawei has experienced 13 quarters to regain the first place in the Chinese mainland market, with 11.7 million units shipped and a market share of 17% thanks to the enthusiastic market response of the Mate and nova series.

The popularity of the Huawei Mate 60 series is the direct reason for the significant increase in the market share of Huawei mobile phones in China. According to IDC's quarterly mobile phone tracker, Huawei ranked fourth in China's smartphone market shipments in the fourth quarter of 2023 with a market share of 13.9%, up 36.2% year-on-year from 10.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022.

At the same time, the return of Huawei's other terminal devices is also accelerating.

Taking tablet computers as an example, Canalys data shows that among the top five tablet manufacturers in the world, Huawei's shipment growth is the fastest. In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei's tablet shipments increased by 70.2% year-on-year, and its global market share increased by 68.8% year-on-year to 8.1%, ranking third. The sharp increase in Huawei's sales is mainly due to the high sales in the domestic market.

Within Huawei, a market share of 16% is considered the life-and-death line of the HarmonyOS system. The market share is more than 16%, which means that the HarmonyOS can rely on the power of the ecosystem and gradually grow.

At present, Huawei's 17% market share of smartphones in China has crossed this life and death line. However, if it wants to promote the HarmonyOS system in the global market, the biggest challenge facing Huawei is how to achieve the replacement of Google Play after completely breaking away from Android.

"Huawei phones can't use Google's GMS, and they can't use Google Play. Therefore, we can only develop when the Hongmeng ecosystem is built. At the Huawei analyst conference, Xu Zhijun made it clear that based on this situation, Huawei mobile phones will first develop in the Chinese market, and then gradually go overseas, and will also be promoted one country by one when going overseas.

In other words, Huawei mobile phones may focus on the domestic market for a long time. In order to fully realize the return of the global market, Huawei also needs to continue to enrich the native application territory of HarmonyOS. (This article was first published in the Titanium Media APP, by |.) Rao Xiangyu Ed. | Zhong Yi)

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