Trade War with China

Tam said:

That could make a lot of Huawei phone owners unhappy. Its better to keep them running the same Android OS. I know I won't be happy if an update would break my games and my apps. You can also get sued by these owners, since this is a breech of sales contract.

In my opinion, Huawei is likely running its skinned AOSP in the Chinese market just like the other Chinese smartphone manufacturers. Its better to sell a Googleless AOSP phone and leave hooks so that you can download and installed Google Play and other Google software separately. Amazon's Fire Tablets is running an AOSP and is Google-less.

It is very difficult to break a duopoly once that is established. See how Blackberry OS and Windows Phone died.

The name ARK OS, ARK sounds like Android Runtime for the AR. K I don't know what it stands for.

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If Huawei is cut off from Google permanently, what is their strategy?

My view is that they would still use the Android Open Source Project (as their are doing for Chinese phones), but build a version with absolutely no Google or US input.

In the short-term, that means Huawei can still retain their Chinese market share, which accounts for half of their smartphone sales.
Then there's some more sales from overseas, although they will have lost the bulk of their overseas market share.

But in the long-term, Huawei keep working on their version of Android, and look to make it equal/better to Google Android with its software ecosystem.
And eventually, if Huawei wants to regain their overseas sales, the Huawei Android ecosystem needs to be competitive with the Google Android ecosystem
So the Huawei Android ecosystem needs to spread beyond Huawei and be used by its competitors, which would require some sort of separation between Huawei smartphones and Huawei Android.

Note that China currently has a smartphone user base of 700M+.
That is larger than the US+Europe combined, so China does have an internal market that can support a rival to Google Android.

AndrewS said:

Note that China currently has a smartphone user base of 700M+.
That is larger than the US+Europe combined, so China does have an internal market that can support a rival to Google Android.

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As mentioned before - China also dominates the phone markets in India (where people tend to distrust Google) and is seeking to expand to markets in the Middle East and Africa as well. Although currently only low-end devices with lower margins tend to sell in these markets - this will change over the next decade as these regions develop and become more wealth/prosperous.

Tam said:

It is very difficult to break a duopoly once that is established. See how Blackberry OS and Windows Phone died.

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It's also very difficult to break a monopoly, see how Airbus died... oh, wait. If you go into any endeavour with that kind of attitude then failure is certain. Blackberry had nowhere near the kind of expertise and resources Huawei does (or the captive market) and Microsoft dabbled in phones and bailed at the first sign of difficulty. Android's "openness" always made cooperation with Google easier than opposition, but now that cooperation is impossible there's going to be unprecedented competition.

What you suggested with the Google Play hooks is impossible since every device maker needs an API token to install the store; how else could Google take the actions that got it anti-trust investigations in the EU? The US government can compel Google to deny those tokens to any company working with Huawei.

Don't forget that when Apple introduced the iPhone and iOS, it was claimed that it's doomed to fail as well. At that time, Nokia's Symbian OS and Blackberry's own Blackberry OS, or even Windows Mobile, were far ahead.

What happened in the following years should be familiar with all.

You won't know until you try. And no phone manufacturer is in a better position to break that duopoly than today's Huawei. For one, China's domestic market is huge and has very little reliance on US app ecosystem. As long as the phones Chinese manufacturers make can run WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, QQ, Baidu and the other essential Chinese apps, people will use it. The Chinese people never had any true access to the Android ecosystem and a lot of Chinese apple users don't even have an Apple account. Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, these are the players in China, not FLAG. It's a no-brainer that these companies will make their apps natively compatible to Huawei's OS, whatever that may be. Even if they don't, the government could simply ask them to. If the US government can force Google to cut off its software to Huawei, it's only reciprocal that China asks its own software companies to make apps that support Huawei's OS.

Another important advantage that Huawei could gain is it's first mover advantage in launching 5G handsets. China is switching to 5G this year and by the end of this year 40 cities in China will have access to 5G. With the roll-out of 5G, people would need to buy 5G phones to jump on the network. Huawei's phones will be the first ones to support 5G and may have the best speeds among competitors, simply because Huawei build's the network and the phones itself. It's only logical that they work together like a charm. If Huawei could combine their 5G advantage and use it to catapult their new OS, that would definitely helps.

Another point that's related to 5G is that, with 5G apps may soon be a thing of the past. If the network has the speed that 5G is promised to deliver, theoretically everything could simply be done in real-time and transmitted back and forth between the server and the phone. So this basically just makes the phone a hand-held screen terminal for large servers and computing units situated in the server rooms of companies like Tencent or Alibaba. This could in the future fundamentally shake up things.

Also, whether or not Huawei will succeed, by this point it already has no choice but to try. As the old Chinese saying goes, by now it's "背水一战", meaning a battle with your back facing the river, so you can't really back off because backing off means death.

Just try, who knows what will happen? Maybe we're witnessing history here.

the problem is oversea market Oppo, xiaomi are using android system, which mean huawei has to compete with them as well. google map, youtube etc are essential in oversea market.

s002wjh said:

the problem is oversea market Oppo, xiaomi are using android system, which mean huawei has to compete with them as well. google map, youtube etc are essential in oversea market.

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The key now is survival, in my opinion. Huawei might lose all of its overseas market if the Google ban persists, but as long as it can survive in the Chinese market, its phone branch won't die and can continue to be in the game.

s002wjh said:

the problem is oversea market Oppo, xiaomi are using android system, which mean huawei has to compete with them as well. google map, youtube etc are essential in oversea market.

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I was thinking about that, the best US option forward is to sign big, long-term contracts at discounted prices to supply Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, etc... with premium parts hoping they can compete with Huawei in China's market to deprive Huawei of some of the revenue it needs to sustain its R&D. If that happens, then these Chinese companies would become vessels for selling US parts to the Chinese market in competition with China's indigenization efforts.

These companies need to resist that temptation and start moving in the direction of self-sufficiency, and hopefully, they can team up with Huawei to support the build-up of Chinese components because if they don't, they will essentially become foreign agents. If that happens, China's government needs to instruct them on the correct path or find a way to shut them down if they do not follow it.

Monopoly laws, a company cannot choose who to sell products to within a single market. Either sell to Huawei or sell to no-one (export oriented manufacturing is another matter).
A producer must offer the same product to all customers/clients within a single market or face anti-trust suits.

China to release unreliable entities list soon and the list is a normative institutional design that targets no particular sector, enterprise, organization or individual being: Ministry of Commerce on Thur

ZeEa5KPul said:

It's also very difficult to break a monopoly, see how Airbus died... oh, wait. If you go into any endeavour with that kind of attitude then failure is certain. Blackberry had nowhere near the kind of expertise and resources Huawei does (or the captive market) and Microsoft dabbled in phones and bailed at the first sign of difficulty. Android's "openness" always made cooperation with Google easier than opposition, but now that cooperation is impossible there's going to be unprecedented competition.

What you suggested with the Google Play hooks is impossible since every device maker needs an API token to install the store; how else could Google take the actions that got it anti-trust investigations in the EU? The US government can compel Google to deny those tokens to any company working with Huawei.

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Boeing didn't have a monopoly, since it was at some point, competing with McDonnell Douglas....which died. Airbus took the gap left by the maker of the DC-8, 9 and 10 planes. Lockheed (before the Martin) was also in the airline business, and then left out of it. Why both McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed went out? Because both flopped when they threw their eggs into the tri jet design (DC-10 and L1011). The DC-10 had its disasters and the tri-jet proved uneconomical compared to the dual jet engine configuration. When Airbus entered the business, those two other companies were still around.

Going back to OS platforms, sorry, Windows Phone --- and one as backed by as mighty as Microsoft --- could not budge it, chances are a new platform won't make alive outside of China. Samsung also did try on their own platform, called Tizen. Now its reduced to smartwatches and smart TVs only.

As for installing Google Play on non Google Play Android devices, check again, that's been done and often using the Amazon Fire Tablets.