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| HUAWEI |
There's a lot of misinformation about what Huawei is actually up to right now. They're making Android phones but with no Google services, they have their own app store. But some things are missing from it. Well, he has their own operating system they've developed from scratch called harmony OS. This is huge news. But no one seems to really have any answers about what's happening with it.
So I spent the last month working with them, just trying to really understand what the master plan is. So in case you didn't know, in May of last year, the US put Huawei on something called the entity list, the list of bodies that US companies like Google aren't allowed to work with. But wait a second, if you're a maker of Android smartphones, and Google can't do business with you.
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| HUAWEI OCCASSION |
How do they work? Well, in a normal situation, Google certifies Android devices. And in doing so they give them access to something called GMS . Google Mobile services. That means access to Google's core apps, things like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, etc. But it also means that third party developers can build their own apps to take advantage of Google services. Say for example, when you open up Uber, you see a map but Uber didn't build their own map system from scratch. That's a massive undertaking. It's actually just data pulled from Google Maps using Google services. But you've probably seen where this is going because Google can't work with Huawei. Right now you don't get this GMS on a Huawei phone, but instead something called HMS Huawei mobile services. And for the last year, the thing people are focusing on, I'd say, understandably, is what's missing what you don't get versus Google Mobile services. But today, I just want to zoom out and show you what I was actually trying to do with all this the bigger picture, which starts with HMS Android, and ends with harmony OS, which I think is fascinating. So right now, when you pick a smartphone, you're probably used to picking between two ecosystems, apple, IOS and GMS, Android.
But what was really trying to make here is a third player in that field, HMS Android. And I mean, that extra competition is good news for everybody. Not just people who buy Huawei phones, but
to understand what it actually means for Huawei. Take a look at Apple. Apple makes smartphones that if you look at their hardware, like the amount of RAM they have, or the size of their batteries or the specs of their camera systems on paper, they are crushed versus top end Android phones. But because Apple builds the chips inside their phones, the hardware and every aspect of the software that runs on top of it, they can design every line of code in that software to take advantage of every last bit of power in that hardware. Apple phones are hyper efficient.
Most Android phones don't have this efficiency. The companies who make Android phones, they buy chipsets from an external company. And then on top of that, they're relying on a software called built by Google, which is another external company. So you can probably see where I'm going with this. The proposition that we're always making is quite similar to Apple's they already build their own chipsets for their phones. But what's happening now is that because of this us ban, they're relying on their own software court to this has its downsides. But the upside is that because of this top down control, they've got there's the potential for that same sort of synergy as an example. Well, according to Huawei, at least, HMS Android has 62% lower latency than GMS Android. So faster communication between the different layers of the operating system and the cherry on top is that if Huawei can pull this off on mass, then when apps do come to Huawei phones, they'll be more power efficient, because they'll be based on a core which Huawei has designed for Huawei phones.
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And the apps might also just be better. You might have noticed something if you're an Android user, your phone takes amazing photos when you use the normal camera app, but kind of terrible photos when you take them through a third party app. Like if I went onto the Instagram camera right now, the photo I'd be able to take would be nothing close to what my camera is actually capable of. You might have noticed that while your phone comes with an ultra wide camera, or incredible zoom capabilities, try accessing these features while taking a Snapchat story. And you can't the problem that normal Android faces is fragmentation. Let's say Instagram was to take a random smartphone, let's just call it phone x and then start tweaking their app to take advantage of let's say it's two times zoom camera and it's 120 degree ultra wide camera that's technically possible, but then they'd have 10s of thousands of other phones to then start accounting for each with their own various Software skins, the Android ecosystem is almost too vast.
And there isn't a system in place to be able to just kind of code with these features once and then apply them to all phones. But Huawei HMS has this system. So what Huawei is trying to do right now is to basically hand developers the tools to take advantage of Huawei specific features. So if you take Instagram as an example, what I was hoping for is that you'll be able to use the main camera, yes, you can do that on every phone. But also the ultra wide was night mode software to take photos in the dark, or even the 3D depth sensor on the front of some phones to better track those AR face filters. Just do it more accurately. It's yet to be seen if developers do implement these features.
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| HUAWEI SMARTPHONE |
So imagine an independent developer is approached by Huawei who says that, all you need to do is to put your app on our app store. And that's it, you'll reach millions more users, we'll help you do it, and you'll get better exposure on our store because you've got less competition. You can see why that's enticing for developers. And while we as consumers Wait for that process to happen. There are some mechanisms in place to make it easier. There's phone clone, which transfers apps from your old phone. But there's something I think is quite important that I haven't seen a single person talk about. It's called more apps. This is basically the first thing I would tell anyone who's going to buy a Huawei phone to download. Because you've probably noticed the first thing you see is every app you've had questions about. And for each one, it will give you either a direct download link or link straight to the web version of that app. And everything you find through here will work on Huawei phones. What I thought was more interesting was the wish list. When you're in the app gallery, you'll see this little option to request an app. And the whole purpose of this is to tell Huawei, what apps are the highest priority to send Huawei the signal to then chase those developers. And when those apps eventually become available, you can make it auto installed on your phone. If it was me doing this, they'll probably also start building like exclusive applications for the app gallery.
I think, Well, we've already started doing this in China. But anyways, that's why core system. But what sits on top of it is Anyway, I'll talk about this probably in a different video. But the important takeaway is that the latest MIUI 10 has been almost hidden newfound emphasis on inter device connectivity. They're really trying to mesh together the smartphone and the laptop experience as an example. But when you try to do this with operating system is vastly different as Android and Windows, you run into some limitations, but that's where harmony OS comes in. So in case you didn't know, Harmony OS is always own complete operating system. They built it from scratch, and it works on smartphones. So when the US ban first came out, this kind of led a lot of us to believe that the call was going to start releasing phones powered by harmony OS. But I can tell you now this actually isn't the plan for harmony, at least for the foreseeable future. Huawei wants to stick with Android for its phones for a few reasons. First of all, that Huawei still wants to work with Google and Google wants to work with Huawei. It's just that the current situation doesn't allow them to do that. If, however, Huawei jumped ship to a completely new operating system, they kind of be shutting that door behind them. And secondly, if I didn't make this clear while I was pumping a lot of resources into getting developers to port their apps over from the Google Play Store, and right now, that's a pretty easy ask, but trying to get developers to redevelop their apps for a new operating system. That's a different ballgame. That said, well, Harmony OS isn't quite what people thought it was. It's a fascinating part of boys master plan, the way it was described to me is as a distributed operating system, harmony is based on something called a microkernel, which basically means the code is not specific to one type of device. So yes, it can run on phones, but it can also run on anything from earphones, to fridges to cars.
But why? Well, imagine all the electronic devices you have right now, maybe you've got a laptop, a smartphone, a TV, maybe a speaker system, each of these devices, they've got certain inputs and certain outputs, like your laptop has a keyboard, that's an input, your TV has a screen, that's an output. So you've got all these devices with their separate inputs and outputs. But the idea here is that if they're all powered by the same harmony operating system, then those inputs and outputs can be pooled. So for example, I could press a button on my laptop to start playing music and inputs. And that can immediately create an output on different device, let's say stop playing that music on my wireless speaker, and then showing the lyrics on my TV screen, it would behave as if all your devices were one connected device, or animal real world example. Let's say someone was video calling me on my phone, I could use the phone's front camera as the input so that the other person can see my face. But then the ecosystem might decide that actually, the TV is the best output for me to see the other person so it can display them on there. And this is a real thing. How many of us isn't just some sort of theoretical pipe dream? They've already launched a TV that runs it. So does the long term goal, this kind of evolving ecosystem of connected devices? I'm hoping I've kind of cleared up some of the misinformation I think some of the stuff I'm talking about here is the first time this has been talked about So, let me know if it was useful and I'll catch you in the next one.
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