Huawei’s next OS will drop Android app support
Ever since the US government banned Huawei from doing business with US companies, the company has been trying to find ways to survive. One of those ways included developing their own mobile operating system called HarmonyOS.
The company has since been working on newer versions, such as HarmonyOS Next, which was revealed earlier this year in the summer. Now according to Huawei’s Richard Yu, HarmonyOS Next is close to release which is good news, but there is one thing users should note and that is the update will drop support for Android apps.
Prior to this, users who had Huawei phones with HarmonyOS could still download and run Android apps (just not Google’s apps), but with HarmonyOS Next, the company is dropping Android libraries support. We kind of get what Huawei is trying to do, which is create their own mobile OS that can stand on its own two feet.
The problem with this move is that by removing Android app support, there might be users who will find it difficult to use their Huawei phones since some of their favorite apps may no longer be available, or a HarmonyOS version hasn’t been created yet. This could create issues for the platform’s viability as we have seen in the past with other mobile operating systems like Windows Phone.
Without a robust ecosystem, users won’t want to adopt it, and developers won’t want to develop for it since there aren’t that many people using it – it’s a vicious cycle. Maybe Huawei’s branding and user base is large enough where this won’t pose a problem, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Source: GSMArena