Huawei has trademarked its 'Hongmeng' operating system

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414d7a41544f34457a6333566d54/index.html

by idl3Y • 7 years ago

48 65 7 years ago

news.cgtn.com

nightfly• 7 years ago

It will also be compatible with all Android apps and Web apps and come with its “App Gallery,” according to Yu.

So likely just a Android fork/rebrand.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

That’s the likely option, but it’s also possible that they’ve come up with a reimplementation of the Android Runtime…

Svip• 7 years ago

Considering Sailfish OS has done that, they might just have forked that instead. Indeed, I believe there are other re-implementations of the Android Runtime out there, they could just have forked.

y0ghur7_xxx• 7 years ago

That's awesome. I hope that all asian phone manufacturers like xiaomi, sony, samsung, and others get together and make an alternative to ios and android. They are big, and they can pull it of. Android apps compatibility is a big plus. Finally some movement in the market.

friedman23• 7 years ago

Yeah, Samsung, Sony, and Huawei getting together to build the os to crush android...

Japan, China, and Korea. Three countries that love eachother. /s

needle0• 7 years ago

They tried with LiMo/Bada/Tizen and couldn't pull it off...

sytelus• 7 years ago

This comes as Google cut off Huawei devices from its Android OS following a U.S. order banning the sale of American software and components to the company

I don't understand what is the point of this. Sure, government/companies doesn't have to buy anything from Huawei but why they are not even allowed to sell Android to others?

fhars• 7 years ago

Because this is mostly not about security, but about trade war and protectionism.

consumer4512• 7 years ago

Because this is mostly not about security

In my view, it is absolutely about security, and much more broad than "spying."

China is absolutely an adversary of the USA. If you give your adversary control of a national asset such as the entire wireless network, then you are a fool. I am no fan of Trump, but holy crap did we allow our security interests to get dominated by business interests in the past.

One great example is that for unknown reasons, we allow Chinese POPs in Canada, however there is certainly no western POPs allowed in China. Here is a story about Canada-to-Canada data being routed through China via a Chinese POP. [0] I remember it being discuss on HN, but now I can't find it.

[0]https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/01/31/israeli-cyberexpert-d...

threeseed3• 7 years ago

Actually it's about security as well.

There is a reason that countries like Australia, NZ, UK etc have either banned the company outright or had to take measures to ring fence their products.

NotPaidToPost3• 7 years ago

Because it's really about destroying China's growing influence.

rqs• 7 years ago

I won't agreed with this a few months ago, but more and more Chinese companies is receiving this kind of treatment. The reason maybe not the same, but the results are, Hikvision is a clear example, even DJI got their name mentioned (I mean, DJI, a toy maker, really?).

So yeah, I guess everything is eventually boil down to that.

zwaps5• 7 years ago

Because thats not enough. Huawei has been stealing IP, is a part of the party and has been caught spying for them, for example in thr Netherlands.

They do not play by the rules, which is why they became a big competitor in the market. Treat them like a normal company, and you will have a chinese state company monopolist eventually.

See Boeing and Airbus, where state intervention was a fraction of what Huawei gets.

Finally, foreign companies are not free to do business in China, why should chinese companies be free to do so here?

Edit: to give an example. Firms in China rarely license correctly for domestic sales, merely for export. No other nominally developed country with so many manufacturers would get away with that. Imagine Germany not licensing for cars they sell in Europe.

So what now? Huawei has lost access to many licenses, such as cpu, memory, sd cards and whatnot. Do you think they will stop making phones? No. They will ignore it, and grt backed by the CCP. In China, this will have no impact.

What SHOULD happen as a reaction is to ban Huawei entirely, and come after other Chinese ccp backed companies next. Because if you ignore the rules of the market, you should not participate in it.

NotPaidToPost3• 7 years ago

They have not been caught spying for the party and they are not part of government. These are outright lies.

Please don't fall for the transparent disinformation spread by some media, and unfortunately by some commenters on HN.

chirau• 7 years ago

Allegations not proven yet. Watch out for your media and information sources

revskill• 7 years ago

If Hongmeng accepts web app to be packaged and deployed on Smartphone, then it'll be a new story.

threeseed3• 7 years ago

You can package your mobile websites today using tools like Apache Cordova.

But good luck getting consumers interested. Because you can spot a website based app a mile away and they are universally awful.

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

Let china continue to block mostly everything except theirs and other countries continue to accept that arrangement, it is fair to china only.

Otherwise the default should be you block ours we block yours.

Free trade for all. Not just free trade for chinese product.

AsyncAwait• 7 years ago

As far as I am aware the likes of Apple are still selling in China and even companies that are blocked etc. it's different vs the U.S. ban, which also affects Huawei in the EU etc.

I am an EU citizen and if I want to buy Huawei products, I don't want the U.S. to tell me not to, especially since you seem to conveniently forget that the U.S. has led many interventionist wars in order to forcibly open markets in other countries to its goods, so you don't have much moral ground to stand on here.

Additionally, the U.S. is also imposing tariffs on the EU and being abusive around the world, (Iran etc.) in general. The world is watching and American credibility is being eroded with moves like these, that's for sure.

Nokinside3• 7 years ago

One thing we all can agree is that America is run by idiots now. Even if they tackle legitimate issues they do it in a way that is stupid.

International trade agreements can be renegotiated and confrontations can be managed professionally. The US would get much more done if it would have sane leadership.

luckylion5• 7 years ago

Let china continue to block mostly everything except theirs

But that's not what's happening. China just makes laws that require vendors to comply with censorship. You know, Germany does the same, only on different topics. Google and others have then decided not to do business in China, they weren't blocked.

The trade problem with China isn't about blocking companies, it's about state subsidies that China gives to key industries that are perceived as unfair.

Nokinside3• 7 years ago

Hongmeng has been slow R&D project. Suddenly the new mobile OS is must have. I'm not surprised if Huawei goes to a shopping spree and buys several mobile OS and mobile UI companies at once.

Buying both Jolla (Sailfish OS) and Qt Group (QTCOM.HE) would be peanuts for Huawei.

Nokinside3• 7 years ago

I just realized that ARM has stopped working with HiSilicon (Huawei subsidiary). HiSilicon used mainly ARM ISA and ARM's microarchitectures. ARM (Softbank subsidiary) loses big customer.

What wil Huawei/HiSilicon do next? Jump head first to RISC-V or adopt MIPS variant. Who will they by to get there faster?

anon10002• 7 years ago

China has a MIPS chip in the wings called the Loongson. Got a lappy with one, works nice.

quink• 7 years ago

I’m pretty sure not least of all EU authorities would step in if the latter were to ever eventuate. Huawei buying Qt would raise a whole ‘nother level of fire storm at the thought of Huawei now buying themselves into, amongst others, a bazillion embedded devices and desktop apps.

pmontra2• 7 years ago

I guess not so many people here have direct experience of the world before the end of the USSR and the cold war. Basically there was very little exchange of goods between the two blocks and their two leader countries made constantly clear that they had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed to all the countries in the other block and were ready to wipe them out if they were attacked [1]

The level of confrontation now is nowhere close to that but that has been the usual state of the world for a longer time than the current open and free Internet and commerce. If we are heading into that direction (if!) all the major players (USA, China, Russia) will build some walls again and pull the strings of their allies. It's both a defensive strategy and an offensive one and it's going to reduce the flow of goods, people and information. Technology stacks will be rewritten and operated locally as barriers are raised. Factories will have to be rebuilt in the west. I wonder if the EU can survive being pulled in three different ways or each country will go its way toward the party that suits them best.

We can look at the 1946-1989 cold war as an experiment to predict how this is going to play out. The winner was who was able to create more wealth for the people in its block. Nuclear weapons were (and are) a strong enough deterrent to make a real full scale war impossible. Be prepared to hear more about them in the next years. However there were many wars fought by proxy, or against proxies.

Tangentially, you might be interested in learning about the origin of the words First, Second and Third World [2], which somewhat changed in meaning since their origin in 1952. They where USA + allies, USSR + allies, all the others. They were not about being rich or poor. Maybe we'll end up with more than three worlds this time or (I hope) business as usual.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

[2] https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=372684438

moltar• 7 years ago

And I can imagine that current “nuclear” is “tech”. Each party will develop cyber warfare in a form of hacker groups, tools, AI, autopilot drones, etc.

pmontra2• 7 years ago

Yes, but they won't lead to mutually assured distruction. Only nuclear weapon can do that so far: ensure that whoever pushes the button die in the counterstrike.

dingaling• 7 years ago

Basically there was very little exchange of goods between the two blocks

Except grain, which the USA provided in vast quantities to the USSR in order to prop-up its system in the wake of poor harvests.

There was a brief blip in 1980 when President Carter vetoed it, before resuming under President Reagan.

Why not use it as a lever to bring down the Soviet system 20 years earlier? Because the balance of power was quite convenient.

dogma1138• 7 years ago

It’s not that the balance of power was convenient is that a major disturbance in it could’ve been deadly.

A civil war in the USSR at the time could have literarily ended the world as we know it.

The fact that the only major thing we got at the fall of the USSR was the attempted 1991 ‘August Coup’ is a miracle as things could’ve ended so badly for Russia and the entire world.

leke• 7 years ago

It seems the EU are for lifting sanctions and resuming relations with Russia (and subsequently keeping relations with China). I don't know, but I bet this has a lot to do with our relationship with the current US president's attitude and his trade tariffs. A second term for president Trump will probably cement this relationship.

I feel it's something that the EU wants and we surely care more about the Western democratic culture, but not at the risk of our own financial ruin.

luckylion5• 7 years ago

I don't know, but I bet this has a lot to do with our relationship with the current US president's attitude and his trade tariffs.

It could also be a continuation of the German "Wandel durch Annäherung" policy ("Change by Rapprochement"). People you do business with won't shoot at you, and will generally be more willing to talk to you about human rights, nuclear disarmament etc than people you don't do business with.

yorwba2• 7 years ago

The name is a reference to ancient classics [1]. I've also seen some excited posts (e.g. [2]) mentioning that Huawei also trademarked a bunch of mythological beasts from the Classic of Mountains and Seas [3].

Based on the reactions I've seen, that was a good move to capture patriotic sentiments. On the other hand, I'm not sure how many patriotic Chinese were buying foreign phones, so they may end up only gaining market share from other Chinese competitors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Meng

[2] https://m.sohu.com/a/316263123_526461/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas

ubersoldat2k7• 7 years ago

This thing is dead before even leaving China. Who on the west would want to buy a phone they can't use to watch Netflix, Hulu, HBO? Because if Huawei lost licenses to Android, what makes them think DRM technology providers will, which mostly are US based. And they sure can build their own DRM stack, but good luck on selling it to Disney or Comcast.

Also, apps compatible with Android. Please, don't make me laugh. You're so naive. Android works because you can monetize apps. If you can't monetize them, you don't build them. Free apps are monetized with ads, which are completely embedded into Google systems (yes, you could use others, good luck with that). Paid apps are monetized by Google Wallet, so another thing Huawei has to build. And believe me, I sure as hell won't trust the Chinese government (AKA Huawei) to handle my money.

Huawei has trademarked its 'Hongmeng' operating system

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