As many of you might have heard by now, Huawei is expected to develop its own alternative to Google’s Android operating system. This is in response to the US government who had previously put Huawei on its Entity List, ultimately preventing the company from doing business with US companies such as Google.We had heard that the operating system that the company is developing is known as HongMeng, but now it turns out that Huawei might be having second thoughts. According to a report from the South China Morning Post, Huawei chairman Liang Hua was quoted as saying, “We haven’t decided whether to develop Hongmeng into a smartphone OS yet.”
We should point out that Liang’s statement was merely a clarification about its HongMeng platform, where the company did acknowledge that it was in development, although it seemed to be mostly aimed at Internet of Things devices, as opposed to smartphones. This doesn’t mean that the company isn’t working on an Android alternative, but according to Liang, they would ultimately still prefer to use Android if they can.
As it stands, Huawei still remains on the US Entity List, but a recent decision meant that Huawei could do business with US companies again, as long as the licenses are applied and that the business dealings don’t involve national security.