Huawei's Harmony OS has its work cut out

Huawei has finally announced the fully domestic version of its HarmonyOS, completely cutting ties with Android. It describes HarmonyOS Next as the biggest upgrade of the OS since it was created eight years ago.

Harmony began life as a small-footprint OS for IoT devices and home appliances. But since the US cut Huawei's access to Google Mobile Services, it has been steadily upgraded to support smartphones.

HarmonyOS has made some progress, overtaking iOS to be no.2 in the Chinese market, while worldwide it had a 4% market share in Q1, according to Counterpoint.

At the launch event two weeks ago Richard Yu, the head of Huawei's device business group, dropped some more numbers. Yet these really expose the platform's limitations.

For one, Harmony is said to be installed on more than a billion devices. In reality, most of those are IoT terminals, and almost all are in China. The real work is to put Harmony on the smartphone, the human race's favorite personal device.

Just an icon

Here it meets another reality check. According to Yu, 15,000 apps have been written for the platform. This is a rounding error compared to the 1.6 million apps available to Android and the 1.54 million on iOS. 

But more importantly, a huge number of the purported Harmony apps don't work. Many are no more than a screen icon.

For example, WeChat, the ubiquitous super-app, offers just basic functions such as individual chats and phone calls, according to tech blogger Lu Songsong.

He writes that at least one-third to half of those 15,000 apps are not yet fully adapted to Harmony. The remaining 60-70% of those that have been re-written for Harmony are 'early adopter versions', with limited functionality.

He estimates it would cost around six months and up to 600,000 Chinese yuan (US$84,000) in developers' salaries to adapt an Android app to Harmony – unaffordable for most companies.

HarmonyOS Next faces an imminent test in the marketplace with the debut of Huawei's new flagship phone, the Mate 70 – the first to carry the new OS.

If Huawei's devoted fans are content with this small population of bowdlerized apps then that's another hurdle crossed. If not, Richard Yu and his team have their work cut out.