Why is Hongmeng competing with iOS instead of Android?

Guests | Li Chuanzhao, Song Xujun

Written by | Yun Zhao

Produced by | 51CTO Technology Stack (WeChat ID: blog)

Previously, according to digital blogger "Dingjiao Digital", when the technical staff of a large company were doing adaptation, Huawei repeatedly mentioned a problem during offline communication, that the Hongmeng system hopes to benchmark iOS instead of Android. The reason is that the Android system is too open, resulting in excessive confusion in the software and hardware ecosystem, so benchmarking iOS is the direction of HarmonyOS's subsequent development.

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Around the above questions, "T·Frontline" invited two important guests to have a dialogue. One is Li Chuanzhao, the first individual donor of OpenHarmony and the current founder of the Hongmeng community organization Shenzhen Hongmeng Club, and the other is Song Xujun, a global partner of the well-known consulting firm A.T. Kearney and head of the high-tech and manufacturing business in Greater China. The two guests gave very interesting and informative perspectives on these issues.

Li Chuanzhao believes that "the experience is benchmarked against IOS, which is also Huawei's consistent thinking, that is, we must benchmark against the best in the world, otherwise we can't even start internal projects."

Song Xujun shared this observation: "We observe that Hongmeng's current thinking is to adapt to different terminals through a system, and it regards this capability as a strategic positioning. But simply speaking, benchmarking iOS is not a good idea."

During the conversation, Li Chuanzhao pointed out the inherent flaws in Android's design philosophy, and Hongmeng wanted to get rid of these bad Android experiences one by one. What design philosophies of iOS are worth referring to, and what measures will Hongmeng take to further prosper the developer ecosystem? Mr. Li answered all of these questions.

The following is the conversation about why Hongmeng is benchmarked against iOS instead of Android. The text content has been optimized.

1. How to understand that Hongmeng is not targeting Android but iOS?

Li Chuanzhao: This statement is mainly from the perspective of user experience, because Android has several very serious problems. First, its application expansion is very serious. When you buy an Android phone, it basically starts with 256G. 128G is basically unusable because the average size of each application may be more than 500M. So this is a big problem. Hardware makes a lot of money, but it is actually unnecessary.

Another problem is that Android has some inherent defects in the overall graphics effect, which cannot be changed. Because Android needs to adapt to a variety of different hardware, there will be a lot of various adaptation layers. So when developers write code, an Android application will eventually draw a picture on the hardware, such as a triangle, and the function calls in the middle will have about 20+ layers. iOS may only have 4 layers. A function call and a parameter stack push and pop will have performance loss, which Android cannot solve. Android does have some deep-rooted problems in graphics.

Then, in terms of security, everyone should have had this experience. For example, we are discussing topics related to Hongmeng here tonight. When you turn on your phone tomorrow, all the ads in the information flow will be related to Hongmeng. You go out with your friends to discuss cars, and immediately the ads become car-related. In other words, your privacy has been leaked. Similarly, Apple phones are relatively better and do not have this phenomenon. In fact, this is also related to the settings of Android. An Android application uses the user on Linux as its security key. This setting itself is actually a setting that naturally leaves many loopholes, and this is basically impossible to change.

So when Huawei says that Hongmeng should benchmark against IOS, there are two meanings. It is necessary to remove those things that are affected by some deep-rooted mechanisms of Android, and then benchmark against IOS in terms of experience. This is also Huawei's consistent thinking, that is, it must benchmark against the best in the world, otherwise even internal projects cannot be established.

Song Xujun: There is no need to guess about the positioning of Hongmeng. First of all, he said that he would benchmark against IOS, which might just be a figurative metaphor. Maybe he meant that I want to pursue perfection, I want to achieve high coordination and integration of software and hardware, so as to provide users with the best experience. Because everyone knows that the hardware configuration of Apple's mobile phones may not be the highest, but the user's feeling during use may be much better than that of Android phones with the same or even higher configuration. Because Huawei itself has very deep experience in software and hardware, I think it may benchmark against Apple in terms of software and hardware integration, including high-performance joint optimization, etc.

But more fundamentally speaking, it should return to its positioning of the Internet of Everything, including connectivity, scalability, low power consumption to cope with different terminal devices, modular tailoring and other values. These are some of the areas that Hongmeng needs to focus on or redo.

Because, whether it is Apple or Google, there is no way to cover multiple different types of terminals with one operating system. Independent operating systems are required. Even for Apple, its operating system is becoming more and more fragmented. Due to various historical deposits and burdens, it is difficult to reintegrate.

T·Frontline: Android is open source, Hongmeng is also open source, but iOS is closed source. To compete with iOS, what breakthroughs does Hongmeng need to make?

Li Chuanzhao: Sometimes experience-related things have little to do with open source. It is a system design philosophy. For example, Apple’s design prioritizes user feedback. Every time a user operates on a mobile phone or computer, it gives priority to the user’s feedback. Even if the background task is not completed at this time, it will still give feedback first, so that the user experience is very good.

For example, the tombstone mechanism of iOS means that only one real application is in the foreground. These mechanisms are technically worth learning and even surpassing. Android's design philosophy has been determined and cannot be changed now.

2. Simply put, Hongmeng benchmarking iOS is not a good idea

Song Xujun: We observe that Hongmeng's current thinking is to adapt to different terminals through a system. It is also very meaningful to position this capability as a strategic position. For example, "interconnectivity". Huawei mentioned "hardware mutual assistance and resource sharing", which means that if they are all Huawei devices, they can easily exchange information, use their screens, use their communication networks, etc. In fact, this has been achieved now. This kind of function should actually be emphasized and should be vigorously developed.

I believe Huawei has the ability to do this, because as a communications company, Huawei has previously launched satellite communications, IGRS to replace Bluetooth, and other technologies, which have shown us its ability and potential in solving the problem of connectivity, which is not something Apple and Google have in their DNA. When it can better tap into this potential, the value it will generate will be enormous.

So if we simply say we want to compete with Apple, I don’t think this is a particularly good idea. From the perspective of corporate strategic competition, it is very difficult for a latecomer to overthrow an existing manufacturer that already dominates the market.

So generally speaking, we can simply divide the market into four quadrants. One quadrant is existing products and existing markets, the second is existing markets and new markets, and the last one is new products and new markets. We will find that only for new products and new markets do latecomers have the greatest possibility of success.

Because, whether I completely imitate its original products to capture its existing market, or I use a new product to capture the original market, it is actually quite difficult. But in a completely new field, if I compete, the probability of success is very high.

For Huawei, its brand-new field is the Internet of Everything, that is to say, the platforms it connects and supports include all devices including the Internet of Things, mobile phones, and desktops. All these devices use a set of system systems, but of course it does not require the operating systems of each platform to be exactly the same.

However, having a good public platform, public architecture, and common connection technology to form a whole is a capability that other manufacturers do not actually have.