Produced by Tiger Sniffing Technology Group
Author | Marudoyama
Toutu | vision china
Recently, Wang Chenglu, known as the "father of HarmonyOS", was exposed to have left Huawei.
On May 23rd, Wang Chenglu’s personal Weibo showed that Huawei’s certification had been cancelled. According to the data of Tianyancha, Wang Chenglu has become the only member of the core team of Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Shenkaihong"), and a paragraph in his personal profile explains: "In May 2022, Dr. Wang Chenglu, who led the development of HarmonyOS system, left Huawei, and the next stop was Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development Co., Ltd. (Shenkaihong)."
According to public information, Shenkaihong was established on August 26, 2021, and completed the angel round of financing in January this year. Tianyancha’s equity penetration shows that the shareholders behind Shenkaihong include Huawei, ChinaSoft and CIC, and the actual controller is Chen Yuhong, CEO of ChinaSoft International.
Among the heads of many business departments in Huawei, Wang Chenglu’s presence is not prominent, but correspondingly, in addition to the most concerned HarmonyOS system, he also led the research and development of Ark compiler and EMUI. It can be said that Wang Chenglu’s professional resume runs through the whole development process of Huawei’s consumer software department.
Nowadays, the departure of this veteran will inevitably lead to discussion, especially after the extension of Harmony OS 3.0, the outside world is more concerned about whether this system will produce variables.
However, although this personnel change seems sudden, it actually has signs. At the Huawei Developers Conference on October 22 last year, Wang Chenglu made his last public appearance. At that time, his position had become the president of Huawei AI and Smart Full Scene Business Department, and the president of Huawei Consumer Business Software Department was replaced by Gong Ti.
Wang Chenglu, who left Huawei, is not far from HarmonyOS. According to various sources, his next stop will be to join Shenzhen Kaihong Industrial Development Co., Ltd. and continue to host the development of OpenHarmony.
Since its appearance at Huawei Developers Conference in 2019, HarmonyOS has carried too many expectations and doubts from the outside world. After the mobile phone business was frustrated, HarmonyOS not only shouldered the heavy responsibility of retaining users during the transition period, but also shouldered Huawei’s strategic responsibility for IoT.
In March last year, Wang Chenglu said in an interview with the media that the most important task in 2021 is to "make HarmonyOS’s ecological market share reach 16%, and the watershed of ecological prosperity must be crossed."
So, when Wang Chenglu left, did HarmonyOS cross the line of life and death?
Crossing the line of life and death in one year
Yang Haisong, vice president of Huawei’s consumer business AI and full scene business department, said in an interview: "What HarmonyOS needs to do is to take one year to complete the road that others have taken for five years."
Now it seems that Wang Chenglu did it.
Huawei’s shipments have suffered a cliff-like decline since 2020 due to problems such as chip failure and the discontinuation of Google’s mobile service suite. The HarmonyOS system, which was previously positioned as the "interface of the future Internet of Things", was also launched in 2020, and rapidly expanded from the IoT device side to the mobile phone side.
There is only one task of HarmonyOS system: to ensure that users will not be lost in the case of a large-scale reduction in shipments.
During this period, Wang Chenglu’s team made rapid progress. In September 2020, Huawei released the preview version of HarmonyOS 2.0 operating system at the developer conference, and released the developer Beta version three months later.
On June 2 last year, HarmonyOS 2 was officially launched, which means that the mobile phone equipped with HarmonyOS has become a formal product for the market.
From HarmonyOS 1.0 to the official version of HarmonyOS 2, Wang Chenglu’s team needs to solve many problems. Different from the general mobile phone operating system, HarmonyOS is firstly an IoT-oriented operating system, and its primary goal is to satisfy all kinds of hardware devices with one system.
By the time the official version of HarmonyOS 2 was released, HarmonyOS system already had the basic framework as a mobile phone system and IoT connection center.
For example, hardware mutual assistance and resource sharing based on distributed soft bus and distributed device virtualization are realized among various devices through HarmonyOS 2. At the development level of applications and devices, one-time development and multi-terminal deployment are realized, and at the same time, flexible deployment of various terminal devices is supported as required, and different types of hardware resources and functional requirements can be adapted.
After the release of HarmonyOS 2.0, Huawei pushed the official version upgrade to all mobile terminals in a short time. By December 2021, Huawei had 141 mobile devices supporting HarmonyOS system.
"If the old user has a very good experience after upgrading to HarmonyOS, he may stay. As long as we grab it in these two years, our hardware may come back. " What Wang Chenglu and his team have done is to make Huawei have the ability to build a complete ecology before solving the hardware problem, which is the most precious wealth left by Wang Chenglu to Huawei.
After completing the iteration of HarmonyOS 2, Huawei needs to attract enough developers to participate in the application development for this new system in a short time. It should be noted that when HarmonyOS 2 was released, the number of application developers for iOS was 24 million, and the number of Android application development was 20 million.
To this end, Huawei released the Hormony OS professional certification for the first time at the Harmony Connect Partner Summit last July to help developers achieve career advancement. Two months later, Huawei released the Euler operating system, which can be widely deployed in servers, cloud computing, edge computing, embedded devices and other forms. Through a set of operating system structure, it is compatible with diverse devices.
These developer-oriented service platforms have enabled HarmonyOS 2 to gather more than 1.2 million developers within a few months after its release, helping HarmonyOS become the fastest-growing operating system in the world.
Previously, Yu Chengdong had revealed that the number of Huawei devices equipped with Harmony OS had reached 240 million, the number of monthly users of Huawei terminals was 730 million, the shipment of ecological equipment was 150 million, and there were more than 2,000 ecological partners. This has exceeded the target of 300 million devices proposed by Wang Chenglu last year.
Although the mobile phone business is still constrained, this is the best result for Huawei at present.
Half a cup is not full
On April 28th this year, Huawei officially launched the developer preview version of HarmonyOS 3. At the press conference, Yu Chengdong said that there are still many limitations in the current Internet of Everything, such as the prominent data island effect, and the addition of HarmonyOS has created a possibility for "intelligent connection and collaboration" between devices.
In order to achieve this goal, Huawei has launched Harmony Design System, Ark Development Framework 3.0, Ark Compiler 3.0, DevEco Studio 3.0, etc. These development tool suites enable developers to realize more efficient end-to-end development of HarmonyOS applications and services.
For example, in the past, Huawei provided a multilingual user program framework such as Java/C/C++/JS and a multilingual framework API； for various software and hardware services at the framework level. At the same time, it provides multi-language framework APIs such as C/C++/JS for devices using HarmonyOS, and the APIs supported by different devices are related to the degree of component cutting of the system.
Now, developers can flexibly choose the tool suite according to different devices to complete the assembly of the operating system. Of course, compared with the huge and mature developer teams of IOS and Android, it is still difficult for HarmonyOS’s millions of developers to make up for the disadvantages of applications in a short time.
Although Huawei has been friendly enough to developers, it is still difficult to convince developers to share their energy with HarmonyOS because of the strong barriers formed by the operation of IOS and Android for more than ten years.
Huawei’s response is to continuously lower the threshold of open source. Wang Chenglu once revealed a point: Huawei analyzed the ecological development history of PC and mobile industry in the past 20 years, and found that 16% of the market share is a watershed. If it can exceed 16% of the ecological foundation, it will be successful without being eliminated by the market.
Perhaps based on this consideration, Huawei donated all the basic capabilities of HarmonyOS to the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation in 2020 and 2021, and the latter integrated the contributions of other participants to form the OpenHarmony (open source HarmonyOS) project.
In this regard, Wang Chenglu once explained that Huawei’s move is to enable all families to obtain codes in the Open Atomic Foundation on an equal footing, and eco-enterprises can better make products according to their own demands. Similarly, Huawei also got the code back from the Open Atomic Foundation, and then superimposed Huawei product features to make products.
However, although Huawei has made HarmonyOS completely open source through a third-party organization, this is not enough to support other mobile phone manufacturers to choose to build their own systems through OpenHarmony, because the current OpenHarmony is not supported by Java programs, and naturally it is impossible to support Android.
For the third-party mobile phone manufacturers, it is unrealistic that the mobile phone system is not supported by Android applications. Although Huawei developer official website has opened dozens of Demo, most of them are based on common application scenarios, which is far from being a mature open source system.
And if OpenHarmony can’t get more vendors’ access, then the "16% watershed" mentioned by Wang Chenglu still faces no small challenge before the Huawei chip problem is solved.
Shenkaihong, which Wang Chenglu joined after his departure, is a technology enterprise focusing on the secondary development of OpenHarmony. According to official website’s introduction of this company, Shenkaihong’s strategic goal is to become the leader of intelligent Internet of Things operating system, and it focuses on technical research and development and continuous innovation of intelligent Internet of Things operating system (KaihongOS) based on OpenHarmony.
It is worth mentioning that this company is inextricably linked with Huawei. According to Tianyancha data, the largest shareholder of Shenkaihong is Hongju Innovation Information Technology Partnership (Limited Partnership), which is personally controlled by Chen Yuhong, CEO of ChinaSoft International. Huawei has always been the largest customer of ChinaSoft International. The third largest shareholder is Hubble Investment, an investment fund under Huawei.
Therefore, Wang Chenglu’s departure seems to be not a simple personnel change, but more like a member of Huawei’s initiative to seek partners.
Will HarmonyOS’s ambition be realized?
Regarding Wang Chenglu’s departure, an industry insider told Hu Wei: "It will hardly have any substantial impact on the HarmonyOS project team, and HarmonyOS’s strategic planning will still be implemented along the existing goals."
The insider believes that from the ecological perspective of HarmonyOS, the flow of talents among eco-enterprises has been frequent in the past two years, and many high-end talents have cooperated with core eco-enterprises to varying degrees. Everyone may be able to collide with more new sparks by trying different "combinations".
Having said that, some people still think that Wang Chenglu’s sudden departure will still have an impact on HarmonyOS. Especially in the context of the postponement of Harmony 3.0, the industry is more worried about the future of HarmonyOS, which is mainly manifested in whether Harmony’s "de-Google" can go smoothly.
In an interview last year, Wang Chenglu once told the media, "In October this year, the third phase of open source code in HarmonyOS will be launched, and the code contributed by Google from the AOSP community is almost gone."
Wang Chenglu’s statement made HarmonyOS be pushed to the forefront for a while, but until today, the Hormony system that completely realized "Google-removal" has not come out. However, it has recently been revealed that Huawei will officially release the 3.0 beta version of Hormony at the developer conference held in June.
So, will this version achieve the achievement of "de-Googleization"? The answer may not be optimistic.
Zhihu Digital V @blindpirate once analyzed the code of HORMONY version 2.0 Beta. Statistics show that at least 56% of AOSP codes are submitted by Google, which is not counting the non-Google.com email submitted by Google.
In this regard, an Android development engineer also told Hu Wei, "It is unlikely to remove the code contributed by Google, because Google contracted most of the code of the virtual machine and HAL layer in AOSP."
Of course, there is also an interpretation that Wang Chenglu only refers to the open source part of the code that does not contain Google’s contribution, not the code that does not contain Google’s contribution in the whole system. From this perspective, it does make sense.
Another noteworthy project is HarmonyOS’s "Car Machine Plan". Huawei’s efforts in in-vehicle business in recent two years are obvious to all, and Wang Chenglu also plays a key role in the BU part of Huawei’s vehicle. Before the launch of HarmonyOS system, Wang Chenglu presided over the launch of Huawei’s first intelligent in-vehicle system, and after the release of Harmony 1.0, Wang Chenglu repeatedly said that in-vehicle will be a core link in HarmonyOS system in the future.
Judging from the actual performance, HarmonyOS-Automotive is completely qualified. This car OS has proved the reliability of HarmonyOS’s in-vehicle system on the M5. In addition, Huawei has already reached in-depth cooperation with BAIC, Xiaokang and Changan, and HarmonyOS-Automotive will land on domestic cars one after another in the future.
And will Wang Chenglu’s departure have a secondary impact on Huawei’s car system? It remains to be seen.
However, one thing is certain. With the continuous iteration of HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony, the ecological boundary of HarmonyOS is also expanding. Judging from the size of HarmonyOS today, changes in individuals and even teams will hardly have any impact on HarmonyOS. Only Huawei’s positioning can really affect HarmonyOS. Is it a short-term lifeline? Or the starting point of long-term strategic transformation?
If it is the latter, then Huawei will have to invest more power in basic software such as database, compiler and even programming language in the future. Under this assumption, the influence brought by HarmonyOS will far exceed the system itself.