Notice Launching a new mobile operating system is what professional technology historians call a stupid decision. It’s so stupid that even Microsoft stopped caring about it after three or four attempts – did we all imagine the Kin?

Apple and Android own all the apps, all the hardware, all the market, and between them they have wrung out the sponge of innovation. What kind of crazy Planet Wibble outfit would besiege this stage?

Huawei. Until 2019, it was a Google partner running full Android. Then he created its own version of Androidcalled it HarmonyOS, stopped including Google’s first-party apps and created its own Android app store.

Huawei formalizes its divorce from Android with the launch of HarmonyOS NEXT

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Of the last weekthe platform has kicked out all Android code, avoided all Android apps, and is now developed entirely in-house and relies solely on native apps. According to Huawei, there are 15,000, which is only a lot if we ignore the more than a million applications in the field of the Big Two.

Such boldness must come from something special under the hood, right? The benefits Huawei promotes for HarmonyOS NEXT are only compelling if you haven’t owned or used a smartphone in the last 20 years. Things like letting apps detect the direction of gravity via the phone’s accelerometers seem as fun now as they did when the original iPhone launched. Remember the beer app that let you virtually drink a glass of beer by holding your device to your lips and raising it? It was fun for ten seconds.

Other things have the familiar feeling of ideas that came and went long ago in waves of indifference and irrelevance. HarmonyOS is a distributed system with real-time roots and supports multiple devices working as one. You can move your gaming screen from your phone to a HarmonyOS TV, but still control it from your mobile device, for example, or check the temperature of your HarmonyOS smart oven. Such things make great demonstrations on stage or in the House of the Future where everything, including the refrigerator, runs on the same platform. Is this your life? Do you want this to be the case?

If Huawei were anyone other than Huawei and based somewhere other than China, the rest of the story would be easy to write. A year or two of brave promises, a few hardware launches, numbers that dissolve into a miasma of apathy from punters and developers, and another footnote would be written in the history of both tribes from California.

This won’t happen. Last year, Huawei launched its flagship phone, the Mate 60 Pro, which also defied market logic. It was at least two generations behind non-Chinese flagship phones, it had no international presence, and it was barely marketed in the country. There were, however, two remarkable things about it: it sold in the tens of millions, and it should never have existed.

Four years before, the United States led a coalition of high-tech companies in an embargo aimed at preventing China in general and Huawei in particular from access to modern chip foundries and manufacturing technologies. It was this decision that triggered the end of the commercial partnership between Google and Huawei, but unlike this, there was no clear solution to the material sanctions.

Huawei went from being the market leader in China to a single-digit share as it ran out of stock processors that could neither be imported nor produced locally.

THE Mate 60 showed how much the situation had been reversed. SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, took the technology it had and expanded its capabilities to a 7nm node – not unprecedented, nor cutting-edge, but with yields good enough to support a commercial phoenix. Almost everything else on the phone except memory is also designed and built locally, including 5G and satellite radios.

This is the key to HarmonyOS NEXT. It doesn’t compete with Android or Apple in terms of features or ecosystem depth. Not yet. This competes with Western attempts to prevent China from achieving parity in the technology that confers real power.

China has the resources and the will to push itself towards an accelerated evolution towards a place of independence strong enough to achieve this parity. This requires a comprehensive business environment, which most certainly includes a mobile application platform untouchable by foreign interests. It will take time to get there, but at this point, it’s more than enough.

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There are a lot of unknowns. The Mate 60 was a success, but it ran Android apps. The Chinese state may have geopolitical strategies to support Huawei and the minimum wage, but the average Chinese consumer may have other ideas. The same goes for app developers, over time. The propaganda that fills YouTube with glossy videos about triple-digit subscriber channels makes subsequent moves to new chip nodes look like done deals, but that’s not the case. And true lasting parity will depend on access to global markets with competitive cutting-edge products. There is no sign of this.

It may never happen. Smartphones built entirely from Chinese hardware, running closed Chinese operating systems, and relying on Chinese services in Chinese clouds, seem ill-suited to our own geopolitics. As long as the Chinese state remains unaccountable, authoritarian and addicted to power over its own people, there will be limits to the harmony that comes next. ®