"We did not want to bring [our new] OS to the market as we had a strong relationship with Google and others and did not want to ruin the relationship," Alaa Elshimy, a VP at Huawei Enterprise Middle East, told TechRadar on May 28. The launch of Huawei's alternative to the Android OS has been making headlines in the two weeks since Google suspended its business with the Chinese manufacturer. "Now, we are rolling [the new OS] out next month," Elshimy claimed.
Only he's wrong, and they're not.
TechRadar corrected their earlier story when Huawei contacted them to explain that "there has been some confusion internally," and confirming that "the new Android-replacing operating system, codenamed HongMeng, will not be launching in June this year." Huawei told the site that "the OS could be ready for China in late 2019 and internationally in 2020."
Last week, Richard Yu, Huawei's Consumer Business CEO, revealed that the Huawei OS "designed for the next generation of technology," which has reportedly been in the works since 2012, "will be available in the fall of this year and at the latest next spring." Yu claimed that the new Huawei OS "is open to mobile phones, computers, tablets, TVs, cars and smart wearable devices," critically the "unified operating system" is also "compatible with all Android applications and all web applications."
There were, however, conflicting reports as to how viable the new operating system actually is, with the implication that this might be more PR crisis management than product announcement. The Information reported that the OS project "has had its ups and downs and remains far from ready." More confused messaging.
The rush to reassure consumers around the world that losing Google's software and services can be managed has borne the hallmarks of crisis management, rather than product management. And this latest debacle will not help matters.
Elshimy told TechRadar that Huawei had been preparing for U.S. sanctions and "the OS was ready in January 2018 and was our 'Plan B'," adding that "the U.S. sanctions won't affect the company's operating system and the chipsets in any way as we are self-reliant in many aspects. We have all the chipsets except the Intel chips for PCs and servers. Every single storage player in the market is using Qualcomm chipset and we are the only one using our own chipset. That is why we can go at the speed we want."
Clearly, we can take all that with a healthy dose of skepticism.
According to reports last year, Huawei "started building its own operating system after a U.S. investigation into Huawei and ZTE in 2012." Huawei also has its own OS for tablets and personal computers." Back in April 2018, SCMP commented that the U.S. ban on ZTE from using American products and services "has served as a reality check for China’s technology ambitions—the prospect that ZTE could lose its license to use Google’s Android operating system for smartphones has also raised the question: does China need its own smartphone OS as a backup?"
And then the fears materialized. U.S. sanctions, intended to halt Huawei's domination of the world's 5G networks, also presented the company's fast-growth smartphone business with a cliff edge no one saw coming—despite the "plan-B" rhetoric. “I can’t believe that the U.S. government has limited Android," Yu told the Information. "It’s a consumer product that has no relationship to network security issues." Yu admitted that the U.S. blacklisting came as a "big surprise for me," and means "really a very tough time" for the consumer business.
Yu also acknowledged that, unless the sanctions are lifted, it will be extremely difficult for the company to hit its consumer business targets, which rules out targeting Samsung's crown and may even mean ceding the number-two slot back to Apple.
The impact on Huawei's smartphone business is already hitting home, with the trade-in market now heavily impacted and reports suggesting that consumer interest in new devices is markedly reduced. The company's new flagship 5G devices have also been pulled from the U.K.'s first 5G network launched.
Related: can Huawei's smartphone business survive?
Asked about the potential impact of U.S. sanctions on his company, Huawei's founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei had lost some of his trademark bullishness in an interview with Bloomberg last weekend. "We can become bigger or smaller," he said, seeming to concede that this has now become a crisis.
To maintain any kind of continuing trajectory outside of China, Huawei's near impossible task is to find an alternative to the Google Android ecosystem as well as an entirely new way of building a smartphone that doesn't rely on ARM chip designs. And so it's no surprise that confusion and mixed messaging abounds.
This latest back and forth was ostensibly around the launch date, but added to the confusion around the readiness of the OS itself, the issue almost certainly runs deeper. The idea that an imminent launch of the importance of an alternative to the Android OS for the world's second largest smartphone maker isn't on rails tells you everything you need to know about the state of 'plan B'.
"We are not a public company," Ren said. "We are not only pursuing growth and profit. It's good enough for us to just survive... You can come back to interview us in two or three years and see if we still exist. If we’re gone in two or three years, please remember to bring a flower and put it on our grave."
