Pura70 降价,Mate70 延期,纯血版鸿蒙的生存区又小了一圈。
@科技新知 Original
Author丨Fushen Editor丨Saike
From "shell Android" to crossing the life and death line of 16% of the market share, Huawei's "mixed-race Hongmeng" can be regarded as completing the historical task and beginning to enter the curtain call process.
The "pure-blooded Hongmeng", who took the baton, has less than half a year left before the official debut, but there is a treacherous signal in the market.
Wang Chenglu, the "father of Hongmeng" who used to be the president of Huawei's consumer BG software department, said in an interview, "16% of the market share is a watershed, and more than 16% of the ecosystem is basically successful." ”
According to data released by Canalys, a third-party organization, Huawei shipped 11.7 million units in China's smartphone market in the first quarter of 2024, occupying the top spot in China's smartphone market with a market share of 17%.
On June 21, at the 2024 Huawei Developer Conference, Yu Chengdong excitedly announced that HarmonyOS NEXT, a native HarmonyOS system that uses a self-developed kernel, will no longer be compatible with Android applications.
However, the return of Huawei's mobile phone king has not been firmly established, and the market performance in the second quarter has declined rapidly, and the ranking of mobile phone activations has fallen to 5th, which has been surpassed by Apple and Mi OV one after another.
A more intuitive performance is that on July 18, Huawei officially announced that the price of the new Pura70, which has just been on the market for about three months, has plummeted, with a maximum drop of 1000 yuan. Affected by this, Dong Yuhui, who had just brought goods in the same frame as Yu Chengdong, urgently arranged for the anchor of "Walking with Hui" to publicly apologize in the live broadcast room, and said that consumers who purchased Pura70 could directly contact customer service for a refund of the price difference.
The Pura 70 series failed to replicate the miracle of the Mate 60 series, and the next generation of the Mate 70 has bad news. Combined with the revelations of many well-known digital bloggers, it can be speculated that Huawei's new flagship Mate70 series this year, due to the adaptation of self-developed new systems and new processors, may be postponed to the middle and second stages of the fourth quarter compared with the previous leak around September.
"Pure-blooded Hongmeng" is in the midst of intense beta testing, and it is already ready to be released. As the hardware side of the bow, if you can't keep up with the rhythm and cross the life and death line in the past, it is also possible to retreat.
Part.1
Once forced, once gambled
Huawei's HarmonyOS has come all the way to today, and has been forced to deviate from its original intention from that moment in 2019.
The Ark compiler, which originated from Huawei's 2012 lab project, is the predecessor or cornerstone of HarmonyOS NEXT, which is now known as "Chinese's own mobile phone operating system". The inspiration for the name of the ark, Ark, is also rumored to be related to Zhou Zhide, the chief architect of the Open64 compiler mined by Huawei's beauty research institute, and the homonym of the world-class authoritative English name Fred Chow is the ark.
The initial application direction of the Hongmeng system is aimed at all kinds of Internet of Things hardware devices in the next era of the Internet of Everything, which can be said to have nothing to do with the mobile phone operating system. Lightweight and distributed became its early features, as can be seen in the naming of LiteOS.
The turning point was, of course, the 2019 United States government ban. At that time, both Google and Huawei, with a trace of the last expectation that almost did not exist, continued to speak to the outside world to appease the market. In Yu Chengdong's caliber, the Hongmeng system is still among the spare tires of Huawei mobile phones.
The ultimatum has finally become a reality, and the spare tire urgently needs to be turned positive. Hongmeng, who was ordered in danger, has not yet had time to get out of the laboratory, and it is not completely groundless to be rumored to be a "PPT system" by the outside world. In order to survive the difficult situation, the HarmonyOS system had to be split in two. OpenHarmony, known as the open-source HarmonyOS, continues to explore the road of independent kernels; HarmonyOS, developed on the basis of Android's AOSP, is compatible with Android applications, and carries the weight of Huawei phones without high-end chips and Google's GMS services. "Shell Android" is a portrayal of the latter.
The strategy of delaying the army should not be long-lasting. In order to speed up OpenHarmony, Wang Chenglu, Huawei's internal Hongmeng leader, also had to leave his post halfway to go to the external Shenzhen Kaihong main body as the leader, which once caused various speculations.
Nowadays, the offensive and defensive situation has changed shape. The combination of HarmonyOS and Kirin 9000S processors has made the Huawei Mate60 series return to the Chinese market in one fell swoop, and it has the potential to overthrow Apple. However, the good result of 17% market share is the life and death line crossed by the "mixed-race Hongmeng", and the "pure-blood Hongmeng" who hurriedly accelerated the test took over the confidence?
It's not so much that Yu Chengdong is floating, but that HarmonyOS NEXT must seize the only window in 2024. From the second half of 2023, Huawei's storm caused by the Mate60 series of mobile phones and the Wenjie series of new energy vehicles is inseparable from the endogenous roots and the nationalist feelings caused by the breakthrough of independent brands of high-end technology products.
Returning to the rational and objective comparison of product strength, Huawei and its competitors and competitors in the market can be said to have their own differentiated advantages, but it is difficult to achieve a comprehensive "far ahead". This is also the reason why Huawei has issued a "forbidden language" instruction to Yu Chengdong.
The enthusiasm of the consumer side has given hope to third-party developers who were once unconfident. Hongmeng must catch this "splashing wealth" while the iron is hot, so as to turn the ecological cycle of "developer-application-consumer". Otherwise, once time makes the market calm down, partners who pursue profits will hesitate and wait and see.
Part.2
Open and closed, the road is difficult to choose
The counterattack story that Hongmeng wants to write is no different from that of Android back then.
Andy ·, the "father of Android", developed Android, initially to improve the operating system of digital cameras. Later, due to the recession of the digital camera market, it turned to mobile phones, but it was still difficult to operate and was acquired by Google.
Despite Google's support, Apple had already released the first phone that amazed the world before Android 1.0 was released in 2008. The iOS system on which it is equipped is as old as Windows and uses the Unix kernel.
Under the concept that Jobs' operating system and hardware devices must be vertically integrated, iOS provides the best development interfaces and tools for third parties, and relies on integrated products and services that do not have to consider various compatibility issues, so that consumers are willing to pay more fees, and then share more profits with developers, forming a growing and solid ecological cycle.
Android has been able to do much beyond Apple's "independent kingdom", and now accounts for nearly 80% of the global mobile operating system market, and the main success factor is the opposite of iOS - an open ecosystem of free and open source. Mobile phone manufacturers around the world can add to the underlying architecture of Android and show their talents.
On the same day that Android 1.0 was released, Google united more than 30 upstream and downstream giants such as Qualcomm, HTC, T-Mobile, and Motorola to form a global open phone alliance. Whether it is Lei Jun's Xiaomi or Luo Yonghao's hammer in China, their entrepreneurial road from mobile phone ROM can be said to be due to the openness of Android.
The road to the Internet of Everything planned by Hongmeng in the early days cannot be completed by a closed self-owned system alone. After having to be transplanted to mobile phones, Huawei took the opportunity to launch the "1+8+N" strategy, 1 is the entrance of mobile phones, 8 is Huawei's smart screen, tablet, speaker and other product lines, N represents the IoT hardware ecology in which other hardware manufacturers participate, of which cars later became the top priority.
However, the openness of Android is the reason for its success, and the global mobile phone manufacturers that have driven it to "surround the city from the countryside" is the fruit of success. The core products of Huawei's Hongmeng system, whether it is a mobile phone or a car, are categorically unable to obtain the support of Mirong OV or Wei Xiaoli, and can only fight alone.
In order to cover the huge cost of self-developed chips and systems, Huawei's products are reflected on the consumer side, and they are all in the ranks of high brand premiums, which are in direct opposition to Apple. The Mate60 series has regained a lot of market share, which has a lot to do with the poor performance of Apple's new iPhone15 series last year.
can't follow the old path of Android, and the only way for Hongmeng to survive is more like Apple's "tax collection" in a closed ecosystem.
Part.3
It is difficult to shake Android, exchange blood and purify
The mobile phone rivers and lakes have suffered from the "Apple tax" for a long time.
The "anti-monopoly" protests of the application side again and again are only exchanged for Apple charging a 30% share of the in-app digital content consumption of apps with an annual revenue of more than $1 million in the App Store, and a discount of 15% for small and medium-sized developers with an annual revenue of less than $1 million.
This policy has not even let go of the tipping function in the official account article. WeChat did not take a penny of the amount of the reward to the author, but had to pay a commission to Apple. In the end, under the reconciliation of the number of WeChat users, the APP did not participate in the user consumption, Apple agreed to no longer charge commissions, and the reward at the end of the official account was also renamed as "Like the Author".
Huawei's HarmonyOS ecosystem is currently one of the important means to attract third-party developers.
At this year's developer conference, Huawei announced that in the "circle of friends" of the HarmonyOS ecosystem, WeChat and any Tencent products were not seen.
According to sources, Hongmeng and WeChat are indispensable to each other, and the current negotiations are still focused on Tencent after joining, wanting a more preferential channel proportion. Tencent is so focused on the market, and so will the big companies behind other leading apps. Concessions are essentially another manifestation of cost. As early as 2021, Yu Chengdong publicly revealed that Huawei has exceeded 50 billion yuan in Hongmeng R&D and promotion.
In order to speed up the development of "pure-blooded Hongmeng", Huawei has been sending engineers to partners in leading applications to support development work since the end of last year. But even if the apps that occupy 99% of the time of mobile phone users are only the top 5,000, it is only 0.2% in the sea of more than 2.6 million active apps in China.
At the end of the day, profit-making developers still have to follow the direction of mobile phone users voting with their feet. Huawei mobile phones do not say that they have returned to the peak of the domestic market share of 45%, and they can keep pace with Apple, with a ratio of 2:2:6 and Android in three parts, which is already optimistic.
The Huawei Mate70 series at the end of this year will be the "golden partner" of the latest generation of Kirin chips and HarmonyOS NEXT, and the performance cannot be missed. If the gloom of the postponement comes true, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen4 chip of the Android series will come out as soon as October, and the Apple iPhone16 series will also be released in September as usual.
Even more daunting challenges lie overseas. The account systems of foreign mobile phone users' major social platforms and APP products are almost tied to Huawei's banned Google GMS service. Even if the HarmonyOS system is successful in China, how to face the real core hinterland of Android and Apple in the global market will be another story full of suspense.
The Chinese's own mobile phone operating system, of course, cannot stop at the mobile phone operating system used by the Chinese themselves. But where Hongmeng's pure-blood road points still needs to be verified by one miracle after another.