Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it to you make it” meets OS development

Huawei is the largest smartphone supplier in China – and previously in the world – and in the past 18 months, it has learned an important lesson: the company cannot rely on the United States supply chain. In 2019, the U.S. government banned U.S. exports to Huawei, which cut the company’s access to most chip and software vendors. Building a phone is difficult without access to key parts and applications. Huawei’s latest fourth quarter 2020 figures show phone sales plummeting, dropping 42% year on year.

Therefore, Huawei wants independence from the global smartphone supply chain. While hardware independence is something the company needs to work on, Huawei also needs to get rid of Google software. So, as many companies have tried to do before, Huawei hopes to make an Android killer.

The company’s attempt to create an internal operating system is called “HarmonyOS” (also known as “HongmengOS” in China). “Version 2” was launched in December, bringing “beta” support for smartphones to the operating system for the first time. Can Huawei succeed where Windows Phone, Blackberry 10, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, Symbian, MeeGo, WebOS and Samsung Tizen tried and failed?

To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original internal creation – a challenging act that will allow the company to free itself from the influence of American software. The announcement of Huawei’s operating system in 2019 received large and flashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS “an Android rival” and Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer business group CEO, told the outlet that HarmonyOS “is completely different from Android and iOS”. Huawei Consumer Software President Wang Chenglu repeated these statements last month, saying (through translation), “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS.”

This makes HarmonyOS very interesting. Naturally, we had to take a deep dive.

After gaining access to HarmonyOS through an extremely invasive sign-up process, initializing the SDK and the emulator and examining the developer documents, I cannot come to any other conclusions: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way Huawei describes the operating system to the press and developer documents doesn’t seem to have much to do with what the company is actually sending. The developer documents appear written almost on purpose to confuse the reader; any real shipping code that you hold a magnifying glass to looks like Android, without major changes.

The phrase “pretend to succeed” is often used as motivational advice, but I have never seen it applied to operating system development before. If you’ve seen a modern Huawei Android phone, HarmonyOS is basically the same … with some strings changed. So, while there’s not much new to see, we can at least dissect HarmonyOS and unmask some of Huawei’s claims about its “brand new” operating system.

But first – a two-day background check ?!

Before we dive into HarmonyOS, we have to really get HarmonyOS, which is an incredible nuisance. Supposedly, some Huawei Android phones, like the P40 Pro, can be switched to HarmonyOS through some kind of closed beta. However, this is limited to China. For me, getting HarmonyOS meant finding my passport.

For comparison, let’s first talk about how other vendors serve their operating system SDKs. For Android, you must use the Google “Android SDK” on any desktop computer, click on the first link and press the download button. Apple requires developers to have a Mac for the iOS SDK, but from there it’s just a simple visit to the App Store to download Xcode.

Before trying out Harmony OS, on the other hand, Huawei requires you to go through a two-day background check. They even want a picture of your passport!

Huawei requires you to go to Huawei.com, create an account and then sign up to be a developer by passing “Identity verification”. That means sending Huawei your name, address, email, phone number and photos of your identity document (driver’s license or passport) and a photo of a credit card. You should then wait a day or two while someone at Huawei manually “reviews” your app. Huawei notes that it will not charge your credit card.

Huawei documents say “the identity card, passport, driver’s license and bank card are used to verify and compare your identity information”. OK but why? Why does Huawei want to know everything about me first? And why does it take two days?

Even if you try to skip Huawei’s horrible sign-up process and “pirate” the Harmony SDK by downloading it from elsewhere, the SDK will not run the emulator until you sign in with an account that has passed the two-day background check.

Can you imagine what a potential HarmonyOS developer will think when they get to this step? If you are an established developer in an application ecosystem, it is normal for the ecosystem owner to collect some identifying and financial information. You probably want a developer to be able to charge for your app, which means that you need to transfer money to a bank account, and the ecosystem owner may be responsible for collecting taxes. Now, however, we are miles away this situation with HarmonyOS. At this point, which is just downloading the SDK for the first time, your typical downloader will be a curious developer who is just beginning to investigate Huawei’s operating system. (Signing up for the “Merchant Service” is actually a totally different process than Huawei.)

Curious

It is assumed to be an entirely new operating system, and Huawei’s position on this point would commonly be open to any potential developer. Google’s one-click anonymous download for the Android SDK on Windows, Mac and Linux is the model that companies should emulate. Instead, Huawei is making this as difficult as possible, and it’s easy to imagine a potential developer refusing to download the ridiculous and intrusive download, closing the tab and getting back to Android and iOS development. It is the worst first impression of an operating system I have ever seen. As a developer, you must ask yourself whether Huawei will always be so difficult to work with in the future.

Said that, I did it all.

In the spirit of taking one to the team, I shamefully sent Huawei a photo of my passport and credit card. My information was probably God knows where in China; it looked like a violation and you are welcome. After a two-day wait, my social credit score was apparently high enough that I had access to Huawei’s precious operating system. (Fortunately, Beijing doesn’t have “a file” with me right now.)

Now, let’s see what we have achieved after all this effort.