Huawei's self-developed multi-device operating system – HarmonyOS – is expected to enter the market this year and reach about 2% of the global market by 2020.
Neil Shah, Director of Device and Ecosystem Research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, reported Portal TechRadar Middle Eastthat most of the growth is expected from smartphone sales in China.
“Our assumption is that Huawei will release one or two devices running HarmonyOS this year in China and that volume should be driven. The company may launch three or more devices next year,” he said.
This year, he said that HarmonyOS is expected to 0.1% market share in the fourth quarter of this year and will reach the fourth quarter of next year, a maximum of 5% in China. Overall for this year, he said that HarmonyOS will be 0,03% of Huawei's total shipments.
“Huawei doesn't want to upset Google, but they should roll out to the Chinese market with HarmonyOS smartphones in the next three to four years,” he said.
In addition, he pointed out that there is also an opportunity for Samsung and LG, whose market share is less than 1% in China, to adopt HarmonyOS to increase their market share in China. The launch of smartphones in China with HarmonyOS has a larger scope since there is no Android mobile service for Google in China and Huawei using its cloud services.
Other Chinese brands to follow
According to market rumors, the Buddy 30 Lite is expected to launch in China with HarmonyOS. Shah recently said in the Middle East that HarmonyOS has the potential to become China's national OS in an effort to become less dependent on Google and Microsoft.
If the government pushes out other big Chinese brands like Oppo, vivo and Xiaomi to develop not only smartphones but other products like TVs, he said, then HarmonyOS can scale up and become more attractive for developers to develop apps.
Chinese brands hold over 40% of the smartphone market share in the world.
According to Counterpoint, the company had 15.8%, that Xiaomi had 9%, Oppo had 8.1%, Vivo had 7,5%, Lenovo had 2,6% and Realme had 1.3% as of the second quarter of this year.
Shah said that HarmonyOS is very disruptive to the Chinese market and looking at the architecture; it is quite flexible because it is based on a microkernel and it has opened up the platform to its competitors.
When the time comes and Huawei has more application developers for Harmony OS, Shah said that developers can take full advantage of the scalability of the microkernel architecture.
Forming alliances
Huawei is the biggest player in China in terms of mobile devices and IoT devices.
“Huawei in the next three to four years to build a reliable OS in the Chinese market and make sure it is old enough to go on the offensive and do the honor of launching products running on HarmonyOS and flooding the market with various products running on HarmonyOS”, - he said.
Samsung has done something similar in the past. Samsung used Tizen for low-end smartphones that don't take off and the Korean manufacturer is now using it for smartwatches, TVs and other home appliances.
Huawei already has a growing wearables, IoT and automotive business, all of which could be brought into OS compliance. In the next five years, he said that TVs, smart watches, smart phones and tablets see the above proliferation and then into the car entertainment and electric vehicles.
In China, BYD is the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer and they may also form an alliance with Huawei.
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HarmonyOS