When the U.S. government banned Huawei from doing business with American companies, the Chinese tech giant revealed the ongoing development of its in-house operating system called HongMeng. It will power Huawei devices in case the company loses its access on Android and Windows, and reportedly the new OS could prove better than the competition.
According to WCCFTech, HongMeng is being engineered to run faster than Google's Android and Apple's iOS. The report was based on the recent interview on Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei by the French magazine Le Point, in which some of the OS' features have been revealed.
The Huawei chief told the publication that HongMeng is deemed by company engineers as more optimized than Android, running faster by up to 60 percent. Against iOS, the news story claimed Huawei would do better in terms of speed but provided no approximation.
In the same interview, Ren also stated that HongMeng is not meant to replace only Android when it becomes necessary. The final implementation could also serve as a replacement for Microsoft's Windows OS, which indicated that Huawei is not limiting HongMeng's reach to the mobile platform.
The HongMeng blueprint, in fact, is also geared to have a presence on IoT or the internet of things. With HongMeng fully developed, Huawei appears to be gunning a platform that "could provide a connected ecosystem for potentially millions of users."
Huawei seems to hint as well that its own OS "is a gateway to an interconnected solution of several devices placed in different categories," added the report by WCCFTech.
Ren, however, has acknowledged that HongMeng will be far from perfect. There is no doubt that when the OS is launched, it will lag behind in the app ecosystem. The problem will be resolved by constructing an app store for HongMeng.
Huawei said it would take time for the HongMeng app store to gain traction with developers, who presently are focused on creating mobile solutions on the Apple and Google mobile platforms.
There's a chance too that HongMeng will remain a backup plan for Huawei, CNET said in a related report.
"We are still committed to Microsoft Windows and Google Android. But if we cannot use that, we will prepare a plan B to use our own OS," the report quoted a Huawei representative as saying in a released statement.
But while being treated as an alternative OS at the moment, Huawei it seems is ready to let the public get a taste of HongMeng. According to BGR, it is likely that HongMeng will debut with the Huawei Mate 30 line, rumored to come out later this 2019, but only within China.
