With talk of Huawei’s developer conference this past week, the obvious attention has been to what Huawei’s own smartphone operating system might look like. With sessions already marked out to discuss Hongmeng OS, speculation is running away.
However, despite the Chinese tech giant registering the name Hongmeng trademarks worldwide, there’s been very little else actually said about it.
This week, the South China Morning Post referred to comments from Huawei’s Chairman Liang Hua about the company’s smartphone future:
“We haven’t decided whether to develop Hongmeng into a smartphone OS yet.”
These comments may seem strange, when comparisons have been drawn between Hongmeng OS and Google’s Android – how does one compare operating systems if they don’t operate on the same (type of) systems?
Liang also said that Hongmeng was meant for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and that Huawei still prefers Google’s Android for smartphones. We’ve heard these comments before – including from Huawei Australia managing director Larking Huang – but it seems that despite Huawei’s slowly improving outlook, Hongmeng remains alive and well.
Speculation is that Huawei’s Hongmeng is similar to Google’s Fuchsia – both operating systems able to run on a variety of devices, including smartphones. However, with Huawei’s OS likely to lack the name recognition of Google’s, and unlikely to have the access to Google’s Play Store that it would almost certainly need to succeed, it’s unclear exactly where Hongmeng will land.
With Huawei’s developer conference taking place in four weeks or so, I guess we’ll find out then.
