Source: NetEase Technology
Original headline: Huawei executive: Apple is a software company, and Huawei has started down this road too.
HDC stands for Huawei Developer Conference. The 2020 HDC ran September 10 to 12 in Songshan Lake, Dongguan. On its main visual, HDC gained a suffix, becoming HDC.Together, with the slogan: No stop, No pause, Play together!
It seemed a display of Huawei’s resolve to advance and retreat together with its developer partners. And HDC carried Huawei’s hope of making itself a little softer, for which it launched a full campaign.
A campaign that nearly moved Zhang Ping’an to tears
Speaking at HDC in a hoarse voice, Zhang Ping’an, president of Huawei Consumer Cloud, revealed that a bit over a year earlier Huawei had organised a great battle for the HMS ecosystem: the Songshan Lake Campaign, the highest-spec campaign in Huawei’s history to date.
Explaining the term to NetEase Technology and other media, Zhu Yonggang, CMO of Huawei’s consumer business, said a campaign means gathering people and resources to solve and break through one key technical problem within a set time.
That key technical problem was HMS, Huawei Mobile Services. Zhang said that thanks to this campaign, in just one year the HMS ecosystem had leapt to the world’s third-largest mobile app ecosystem.
Zhu noted that users now demand continuity: Apple is connecting iPadOS, WatchOS, iOS and macOS, exactly Huawei’s strategy. But only on this road did they find that “the ecosystem is truly hard, harder than imagined.”
The difficulty is such that Zhang nearly weeps whenever he mentions it. Talking to the media, Zhang said Huawei has fought countless battles since its founding, but when this one began, “none of us was certain we could win. So many companies have tried to build ecosystems and all returned beaten. Whether Huawei could pull one off, we truly had doubts.”
Yet Zhang firmly believed Huawei held its own advantages: first, it has devices; second, network equipment; third, a better application service ecosystem. Now with HarmonyOS 2.0 released, “we have an OS, plus the app market, Huawei Video and various apps, and with the HMS Core ecosystem on top, we really have a chance to build this HMS ecosystem.”
The campaign originally pulled in 2,000 people, organised on internet-style DevOps lines, “but 2,000 was nowhere near enough, and we drew in more,” Zhang said, until it included all of Huawei, from frontline sales to regional presidents, even employees’ families and personal friends.
“That is what Huawei people are like: the harder things get, the less we accept defeat.”
HMS: making Huawei phones basically usable without GMS
Speaking at HDC, Wang Yanmin, president of global ecosystem development for Huawei’s consumer business, said the duopoly of Google and Apple in mobile ecosystems has lasted over a decade, which serves no link of the industry, developers included, well.
Apple dictates terms, and Google takes 30 percent of in-app purchase revenue; the ecosystem needs a challenger to make mobile ecosystems fairer, he said.
He said with pride that a year after HMS launched, Huawei phones without GMS services had achieved “basic usability.”
Zhang judged that verdict “correct,” proven by HMS users’ rapid growth. Wu Hao, head of Huawei’s AppGallery business, added that AppGallery had 100 million overseas users, that developers had recognised the ecosystem’s value, and that their numbers had grown over 100 percent year on year: “the main problem now is we cannot ship fast enough, not that users reject it.”
Wu revealed that over 70,000 apps were live overseas, meeting 80 to 85 percent of users’ download and use needs, so users found HMS phones entirely acceptable: “especially in some European countries, Russia, India and Malaysia, users face little real obstacle. That experience problem is, truly, basically solved.”
One year of campaign grew HMS’s Kits from 14 to 56 and its APIs from 885 to 12,981. Zhu said the 12,981 APIs far outnumber rivals’: “an engineer went to their websites and counted one by one; we really are ahead.”
Next, HMS must take Huawei phones from “basically usable” to “a pleasure to use.”
Making Huawei softer
The HMS ecosystem left outsiders with an impression: Huawei is valuing its software ecosystem more and more. Talking to the media, Zhu said Huawei has always wanted to become a little softer.
This softness differs from the software code that drives digital circuits. Software has always mattered inside Huawei, Zhu said, but before it was functional software; now the centre is software, ecosystem and experience.
In his view, Apple, far more than a hardware company, has for a long time essentially been a software company: “its hardware range is small, one PC, one iPad, one iPhone to conquer the world.” Huawei has only just started down this road.
Zhu revealed that the ratio of software to hardware engineers inside Huawei may already be one to one, and that early this year Huawei set up not only hardware and software development teams but a software marketing team.
Huawei, he said, will gradually become softer.
A note on sourcing: this article is reproduced from other media to convey more information and does not represent this site’s endorsement of its views. Its originality and the statements it contains have not been verified by this site, which makes no guarantee or promise as to the truthfulness, completeness or timeliness of this article or any part of its content. Readers should verify relevant content themselves. This site bears no direct or joint liability for any infringement in such works. Should any content here infringe your rights, please contact us promptly and we will handle it within 24 hours.
Want to talk through what you just read?
We work end to end, from product design to launch. Tell us about your scenario and we can start there.
Shenzhen XZS Technology Co., Ltd. · Tel 0755-82494862 · 13760424861