Huawei has been actively working to reduce its dependence on American companies since May last year when the United States put the Chinese giant on the “Entity List”, effectively banning the company from doing trade with the US-based firms without explicit permission.
With this, the company has also lost the license to use Google Mobile Services (GMS) on Huawei as well as Honor devices. While this isn’t a major concern for the Chinese market, but GMS is essential for every other market.
As Huawei was left without a stable app ecosystem, it started working on its own operating system and launched the same within months — HarmonyOS. The company also doubled down on app development and recently launched its own Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and is luring developers to use its platform, spending billions of dollars in the process.
Now, in a press conference in Vienna, Wang Fei, Head of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group in Austria, clearly said that Huawei does not plan to go back to using Google services even if it regains the license.
However, soon after this news started making headlines, Huawei responded to this and issued this statement: “An open Android ecosystem is still our first choice, but if we are not able to continue to use it, we have the ability to develop our own.”
The words in the statement are crafted in such as way that it neither confirms nor deny Wang Fei’s statements. It also doesn’t mention Google or its Play Services at all. It said that open Android ecosystem is the company’s first choice, which is already what the company is using for HarmonyOS.
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Earlier, when the rumors about Huawei developing its own mobile operating system as HongMong OS started surfacing online, it was said that Huawei plans to get rid of Android OS from its smartphones and will instead use its own operating system.
However, soon after the launch of HarmonyOS, the company’s executives claimed that Google’s Android still remains Huawei’s first choice of mobile OS and it will continue using it as long as possible. The executive also added that if the company doesn’t get to use Android, they already have an alternative in place.
With Huawei having its own solution, Google had urged the U.S. government to allow doing business with the Chinese company as the company could lose around 700-800 million users. If Huawei’s plan for its own OS takes off and if the company manages to convince other Chinese mobile makers to use its operating system, then Google could lose its monopoly in the mobile OS market.
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(Via)
