So recently, I saw the news that openHarmony has reached its 3rd anniversary.
Despite many bumps along the way, I think it's fair to say that this is a successful OS so far. The key decision that Huawei made is to allow openHarmony be an OS that supports wide variety to devices, including all the industrial tools. As such, it reached market penetration of 470 million units by August of this year.
With the possible threat that America may ban certain Chinese messaging apps from iPhone and Android stores at some point. It's more imperative than ever for Chinese phone makers and even large soft tech players like Tencent and Alibaba to start producing phones with openHarmony. Can you imagine the disaster if WeChat is banned from android App Store? As far as I can tell, Harmony 3.0 will support Android 12.
As we know, Chinese smart phone companies do have the largest combined market share of any country. I believe it has the largest market share of desktops also. While it maybe too much to get other countries to use KylinOS, it shouldn't be too much for Chinese smart phone/tablet/laptop makers to slowly roll out more and more devices with Harmony OS. Of course, initially just for China and Asian markets. The compatibility with Android apps will be a good selling point. Eventually, smart phone producers like Xiaomi and Oppo can advertise more phone models with Harmony OS.
As I discussed in BRI/Global south thread, China is looking to win the next revolution of industrial 4.0 among others. Taking over the digital infrastructure that people from other countries (especially global south countries) use is the way you win.
Huawei open sourcing Harmony OS was a great move. What's needed now is more coordination within the Chinese software industry to adopt and contribute to it. The key to defeating US domination of software platforms is to embrace open source, transparency, and international collaboration at a genuine scale. Not to copy Google, but to out do Google, in making it accessible to *everyone* and the ecosystem associated with it, as well.
Basically, to beat first mover's advantage, you need to be more accessible and cheaper, and you need to sacrifice profits for the long-term benefits of getting people off of the US platform ecosystem.
For instance - Google Store, like Apple Store, charges a huge fee for application developers to do transactions through them. China can beat that by lowering or even eliminating that fee. Google and Apple hold monopolistic controls over much of their platform, despite the core platform being "open source" - this is, in fact, why they're able to ban Chinese applications on them in the first place. To beat that, you need to go full open source and prove to international partners that China will never be able to block access the way the US does.
There are going to costs. You could argue - "why would we even bother to make a separate platform if we can't make a profit like Google and Apple does?" But the value has become obvious, post-US sanctions. Getting people off of monopolistic Western platforms is the value, in and of itself.
Being willing to sacrifice for that goal is critical to winning the platform war.