The new operating system that Huawei recently announced represents a significant shift in the balance of global technological geopolitics. The analysis by Andrea Monti – Adjunct Professor of Digital Law, University of Chieti-Pescara – Initially published in Italian by Formiche.net
With the release of the P60 smartphone, Huawei had surprised financial and, above all, geopolitical analysts by demonstrating that it had access to processors developed on 7-nanometre chips, an almost inexplicable achievement considering the bans on exports to China of the technologies required for this purpose, which showed how much the gap with Western technologies had narrowed. The recent launch of the P70, the successor to the previous model, although at first glance, less geopolitically impactful, nevertheless raises questions that are worth reflecting on.
Is China really capable of producing chips as thin as Western ones?
Firstly, the new smartphone demonstrates the further processes in chip engineering. After the 7 nanometre chips, in fact, it seems that Chinese foundries have found ways to build even thinner chips, further narrowing the gap with Western technologies. Whether this is true in absolute, theoretical terms and in terms of actual production capacity will only be discovered with the passage of time. The fact remains that, objectively, progress in this area is certainly significant and unforeseen.
Tthe technological separation from the West and the creation of an alternative open ecosystem
The P70 will be equipped with HarmonyOS Next, hard not to see the Confucian inspiration in the name, a new version of the operating system entirely developed by the Chinese giant in response to the impossibility of using Google services in the Android environment caused by the bans imposed by the US government.
With the new version of HarmonyOSNext, Huawei has definitively isolated itself, in technological terms, from Android to the extent that its applications do not run on the Chinese operating system. In terms of market penetration, the success of this strategy will depend on how many applications will be available to users and how quickly these will be developed.
The news of the deployment of the new operating system is not only relevant for the market – albeit of great economic impact – of mobile devices, but has a much broader scope, since it represents the start of the Chinese attempt to build an entire ecosystem, made up of processors, operating systems, software and development platforms, as an alternative to Android.
The attack on the Apple-Google duopoly and the technological independence of emerging countries
If this strategy succeeds, it would create a tripolarity in the smartdevice market currently held by the iOS (Apple’s operating system) and Android duopoly. Moreover, and herein lies its geopolitical significance, it would represent a real alternative for all those emerging countries, members of the Brics, but not only, that want to achieve a technological independence from the West, as suggested, for example, by India’s choice to support the Risc V initiative.
In fact, while HarmonyOS Next is governed by a proprietary licence (and it will be interesting to study the impact on the possibility of compromising the security of the terminals that use it), there is an open source version called OpenHarmony, available to any device manufacturer (not only smartphones and tablets, but also IoT, medical equipment and so on) to create an alternative ecosystem to Android.
The growing possibility of creating a mobile technology supply chain decoupled from Western technologies
A different, non-Western software ecosystem increases the bargaining power of those countries that, until now, had no alternative in their policy choices regarding telecommunications networks. Indeed, Huawei’s significant technological capacity in 5G and in the network equipment should not be forgotten. Such a supply chain represents, on the one hand, a powerful competitive tool against Western operators but, on the other hand, also an equally powerful geopolitical tool that allows emerging countries a chance to build their own digital infrastructure independently (or at least not dependent on the West).
Access to open source technologies from the *nix world and technological osmosis
The creation of an ecosystem distinct from and incompatible with that of the West, however, does not mean that Huawei has lost interest in applications in the *nix world and beyond.
The Chinese giant, in fact, maintains an active participation in the support of the Linux kernel and other platforms, such as Kubernetes, which make it possible to develop applications that are self-consistent (i.e., not dependent on the operating system) and can therefore run in multiple environments without needing to be rewritten or adapted.
Conclusions
The creation of an operating system for mobile devices that is completely autonomous and independent from the dominant ones is a further element that contributes to the creation of a self-consistent telco platform, which starts from the development of semiconductors and processors and the transport infrastructure (power plants, BTS, mobile radio technologies, network equipment), passes through terminals (smartphones, IoT, sensors and wearables), and arrives at operating systems and software platforms.
Seen as a whole, therefore, Huawei’s technological strategy is most likely destined to play a primary role in the ongoing reorganisation of the new world order and to radicalise technological bipolarity with the US, substantially cutting off the European Union.