Sun Bing, a reporter from China Economic Weekly, | Beijing reports
"HarmonyOS is the fastest growing smart terminal operating system in history. To date, more than 150 million devices have used HarmonyOS, including smart screens, tablets, watches, smart speakers, IoT devices, and more. It is expected that by the end of the year, the number of '1+8' products equipped with HarmonyOS will reach 200 million, and more devices will be equipped with HarmonyOS next year. ”
At the "Huawei Developer Conference 2021" that opened on October 22, Yu Chengdong, Managing Director of Huawei, CEO of Consumer Business, and CEO of Huawei Smart Vehicle Solution BU, excitedly revealed Hongmeng's latest report card.
The number of Hongmeng equipment has exceeded 150 million
But that's not the most exciting news. Yu Chengdong said that harmonyOS' goal is to become the cornerstone of building "billions of connections and intelligent connections for all things", and in the automotive field, Hongmeng ecology is undoubtedly very worth looking forward to. According to him, the new generation of luxury mid-size SUV cooperated by Huawei and Xiaokang Xilis will be equipped with a smart cockpit based on HarmonyOS and will be available at the end of this year or early next year.
"The automotive industry is experiencing the biggest change in a hundred years, that is, to meet the 'new four modernizations' of electrification, intelligence, networking and sharing, of which the most important is intelligence and networking. HarmonyOS will bring great improvements to the intelligent and networked user experience of the automotive industry. Yu Chengdong said.
In three years, it has invested more than 50 billion yuan to build Hongmeng Ecology
Yu Chengdong revealed that in the past three years, Huawei has invested more than 50 billion yuan in the construction of the Hongmeng ecosystem. At present, "Hongmeng ecology has begun to take shape".
"In the last century, the greatest companies were not companies that made products, but companies that had the right to speak about standards and patents; and in the 21st century, the greatest companies of this era were ecological enterprises. Huawei has contributed two major open source operating systems to the industry, one is the OpenHarmony open source project and the other is the OpenEuler open source operating system. Yu Chengdong said.
Previously, Huawei has donated all the basic capabilities of the intelligent terminal operating system HarmonyOS to the Open Atom Open Source Fund to form the OpenHarmony open source project. At the same time, Euler, an open source operating system for digital infrastructure, will also share capabilities and interact with HarmonyOS.
"Only by opening up can we quickly promote scientific and technological progress." Huawei has contributed two major operating systems and opened them into open source projects, which is to provide a powerful digital base for thousands of industries. Yu Chengdong said.
Focusing on the Hongmeng ecosystem, Huawei provides HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS Connect based on OpenHarmony. HarmonyOS is the "1+8" intelligent terminal device supporting Huawei, while Hongmeng Zhilian provides intelligent interconnection capabilities for the vast number of IoT devices and ecological partners, bringing a wealth of "N" devices.
"Huawei hopes to work with global developers and partners to create a new ecosystem of intelligent connection of all things, a powerful ecosystem for 1+8+N all-scenario devices." Yu Chengdong said.
Hongmeng Zhilian provides pre-integrated solutions to accelerate the incubation of ecological products. According to reports, as of now, Hongmeng Zhilian has more than 1,800 hardware partners and 4,000 ecological devices, with more than 60 million new shipments this year; the number of HarmonyOS atomization services developed by more than 400 partners has exceeded 16,000.
Because the traditional development mode of intelligent hardware manufacturers, from chip selection to module design, to drive development, connection adaptation, and function development, the cycle is very long and the speed is very slow. The pre-integration solution of Hongmeng Zhilian has been supported by 11 chip manufacturers and 28 chips, and the modules have been 11 and 20 models can be used, and the number is still growing. Hongmeng Zhilian makes the development of intelligent hardware manufacturers efficient and convenient.
At the conference, Huawei released the latest HarmonyOS 3 developer preview, HMS Core 6 and a series of development technologies, tools, and platforms. These will not only greatly improve the development efficiency of Hongmeng equipment, but also greatly reduce the development cycle, cost and development threshold.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that Huawei announced that it will release a new self-developed programming language for HarmonyOS. "This will make up the last link for Hongmeng's ecological infrastructure." Gong Ti, President of Huawei's Consumer Business Software Department, commented. Prior to this, there was no mainstream programming language developed by Chinese companies.
"No one can extinguish the starry sky, and the spark of stars can burn the plains." Yu Chengdong said.
The Hongmeng system will "get on the car" for the first time, and behind the "smart cockpit" is a big chess game
It is undeniable that even if it has begun to take shape in a very short period of time and the growth rate is amazing, if you compare the Apple-led iOS ecology and the Google-led Android ecosystem, there is still a huge gap between the Hongmeng ecology.
Google once revealed at the "Google I/O 2021 Developer Conference" that the number of active Android devices worldwide, including smartphones and tablets, has exceeded 3 billion. According to the statistics of a number of third-party market research agencies, the share of Android systems in the global market is about 85%.
This means that if Hongmeng wants to "overtake in the corner" and the latecomers are on top, it must choose another path and breakthrough. This is also why Huawei Hongmeng has always stressed that it is not actually a player on the same track as Google's Android and Apple's iOS. Because Huawei has not thought of doing a mobile phone operating system since it planned to launch the Hongmeng system, because this plan is likely to be "more fierce and less auspicious". After all, it's almost impossible to disrupt the head business in the old format, and history has proven this countless times.
Just as the difference between 5G and 4G is not just "faster", Huawei's goal of Hongmeng is to create products, services and ecosystems for the new era, so as to seize the epic opportunities of the new era of Internet of Everything with the arrival of 5G.
Apparently, Huawei is looking at a scenario that rivals the imagination of a smartphone: a car. Huawei, which has always insisted on "not building cars", will launch its upcoming product called "smart cockpit".
Huawei's official "self-introduction" to the smart cockpit contains 6 of the most important functional modules (HMS-A kit), namely voice control Kit, visual perception Kit, seamless flow Kit, audio sound kit, driving safety KIT and AR-HUD Kit, which will make the car "transform" into a super intelligent terminal.
For example, in addition to a smart large screen, with the help of radar sensors in the car, users do not need to touch the screen, you can complete some simple operations over the air, such as adjusting the volume level, switching video content, etc. The "seamless flow" between the mobile phone and the smart cockpit is also a major highlight, such as no need to operate, and the content played on the mobile phone will continue to play on the large screen of the car after the user sits in the cockpit.
Smart cockpit
At present, the HarmonyOS smart cockpit has been adapted to autoNavi Map, NetEase Cloud Music, Himalaya, Kuaishou and other applications, basically covering map navigation, audio-visual entertainment, live podcasts and other common use scenarios in the car. According to Yu Chengdong, by the end of this year, Huawei will work with developers to plan to list more than 100 applications for users to choose to use.
"Huawei hopes to make the user experience of the smart cockpit surpass other manufacturers around the world through the Hongmeng system." Yu Chengdong said. It can be seen that Huawei's ambition to let Hongmeng "get on the car" is indeed not small.
"Looking back at the 1990s, the opening of the World Wide Web opened the Internet era; and the open source of Linux created a new model for large-scale software collaborative development, making the open source ecosystem flourish. Huawei hopes to work with partners and developers to build a new Hongmeng ecosystem and openly embrace a new era of 'billions of connections and intelligent connections for all things'. Yu Chengdong said.
Image source: Courtesy of Huawei
Editor-in-charge: Guo Jiyao
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