During the American and Chinese trade war, the United States banned all companies from collaborating with Huawei by putting them on a blacklist. This had extreme consequences for them as a mobile company. Among these consequences were that Huawei was no longer able to source smartphone components from the US, they weren’t able to source any chips from the U.S. and in general all-American companies were prohibited from doing business with Huawei. The biggest problem that Huawei faced is that they were no longer able to use android as a software for their phones as well as the complimenting ecosystem and applications.
As a reaction, Huawei started developing a new software for its phones called harmony OS, which according to Huawei is more flexible and faster than android (60%). Furthermore, a single line of code with harmony OS has the same results as 100 lines with android making it extremely efficient to develop. Furthermore, Huawei is planning on creating an ecosystem with its products, letting you as a user connect your phone with your smart home and your car.
Regardless of all these benefits, Huawei has over Google there is reason to believe they won’t be able to win the smartphone software war.
The first reason is that the smartphone software is a platform-based ecosystem that feeds off of users. This means the software is a networking good where value is created by the number of users. Google and Apple have far larger user bases than Huawei and it will take harmony OS a long time to catch up.
The second reason is, that even though they have been banned in the United states their prices haven’t been reduced and they’re fairly competitively priced with industry averages, which makes it difficult to acquire new users.
Finally, the initial reason for Huawei being banned was anti-trust. If they weren’t trustworthy before why would you let Huawei have access to all your data in form of Harmony OS. The company has to turn its image around completely, and that is not a simple task.
https://medium.com/@mmk1.dp/is-harmony-os-better-than-android-bb1bcf4f2691MrWhoIsTheBoss. (2020). Huawei is replacing Android. Retrieved from:
Khan, M. (2019). Is Harmony better than Android. Retrieved from:
