Frankly speaking, when I attended the Huawei Developer Conference last year and saw HarmonyOSNEXT (which only runs Hongmeng native applications, so it is also called "pure-blooded Harmony"), Xiaolei did not expect that the Hongmeng native application ecosystem would develop so fast. On September 25, Huawei officially announced the launch of the HarmonyOSNEXT plan, and the Hongmeng native application was fully launched, followed by the turbulent "Hongmeng 100 Days":
Meituan, Alipay, Air China, China UnionPay, Bilibili, MiHoYo and other leading partners in various fields have officially announced the launch of the development of Hongmeng native applications; Xiaohongshu and iQiyi have gone faster, and have successively announced the completion of beta version development of Hongmeng native applications; Douyin and Baidu have not yet officially announced, but they have released Hongmeng developer positions in the recruitment market.
Hongmeng developers have bucked the trend and become a hot commodity in the talent market. Their salaries are far higher than the industry average. Developers flock to Huawei's official developer website, creating a hot phenomenon with 10,000 new Hongmeng developers registered in one day. Many 985/211 universities offer Hongmeng courses, among which Nanjing University directly replaced the original Android courses with Hongmeng courses.
There are also media reports that Huawei will hold an important Hongmeng event on January 18, at which time it may announce news about more partners, developers, and user experience.
At this point, it can be said that the vitality of the Hongmeng ecological chain has been fully stimulated.Pure-blood Hongmeng has been "expanding" for 100 days, and the dawn of a new world has emerged.
The operating system is not difficult, the difficulty is the ecology
The importance of the operating system is self-evident, but as Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen said in the 2020 Songhu Dialogue, "The difficulty of building an ecosystem is comparable to building an atomic bomb." Developing an operating system is not the biggest challenge. The real challenge lies in building and maintaining a strong ecosystem.
In today's era, the success of an operating system depends largely on whether its application ecosystem can meet the broad needs of users.
When Windows 10 was released, Microsoft hoped to unify the application ecosystem of Windows PCs, mobile phones, Xbox game consoles, HoloLens and other devices through UWP (Universal Windows Platform). Although the idea was good, UWP was ultimately unsustainable due to the lack of a strong application ecosystem. By the fall of 2022, Microsoft had already urged developers to switch to the new Windows App SDK in development documents, basically announcing the death of the UWP ecosystem.
Even for Microsoft, it is very difficult to "build a new building" on top of the extremely mature Windows PC ecosystem. Gong Ti, President of Huawei's Terminal Business Software Department, pointed out, "If there are three major battles to build the Hongmeng operating system, two have been completed so far: the Hongmeng base has more than 100 million lines of code and more than 20,000 APIs; and there are more than 700 million Hongmeng ecological devices. The third battle is ecology.If the ecology is successful, Hongmeng will be successful!"
In terms of hardware, operating system manufacturers may also adopt independent development methods. In terms of software, it is impossible to develop all by themselves. The only option is to call on partners to join. The extended question is how to cultivate and attract more Hongmeng development talents, develop rich applications to satisfy consumer experience, and then attract more users to use it.
But how to attract developers and partners in the ecological chain to join, and to revitalize the ecological chain of partners, developers, and users, is the most difficult part of building an ecosystem.
In fact, Hongmeng Ecosystem has been building momentum for four years.
Four years of planning, one day of completion
In Go, a game is usually divided into three stages: layout, middle game, and ending (official). Different from the middle game and the closing stage, the layout stage often has fewer moves and cannot be accurately calculated, so it extremely tests the player's overall view.
From this perspective, Huawei is undoubtedly a "chess player" with a strong view of the overall situation.
Look back todayThe breakthroughs achieved by Hongmeng Ecosystem in the past 100 days are obviously not an unprovoked explosion, but a long-awaited sprint.
In August 2019, Huawei Consumer Business CEO Yu Chengdong released the Hongmeng operating system HarmonyOS at the Huawei Developer Conference, which has so far been iterated to HarmonyOS 4.0. To ensure daily use, all Hongmeng versions currently available to users are compatible with Android, but the seeds of Hongmeng native were planted early in 2019.
Since 2019, Huawei has been closely contacting Hongmeng ecological partners and signing Hongmeng application development agreements with them.
Four years later, in September 2023, Huawei Yu Chengdong announced that HarmonyOSNEXT was ready to go, and Hongmeng native applications were fully launched. Since then, good news about Hongmeng Ecosystem has spread frequently, and partner companies have announced, started, or completed beta development of Hongmeng native applications.So far, more than 100 of the TOP200 applications have started Hongmeng native adaptation work.
Developers are the source of ecological vitality, and Huawei has been cultivating and gathering Hongmeng developers for a long time.
In 2020, Huawei selected a group of external developers to have first access to internal code, allowing them to preach Hongmeng from a professional developer perspective. In the past few years, Huawei has held intensive developer activities and organized competitions, training certifications, and salons for developers to help developers grow and further integrate into the Hongmeng ecosystem. According to statistics, in the past three years alone, Huawei has participated in more than 150 course projects in more than 100 universities, and the number continues to increase today.
In 2020, Huawei also upgraded the "Shining Star Plan", investing US$1 billion to encourage developers to innovate, and has continuously upgraded it in the past three years. In 2022, it added incentives for developer partners to access Hongmeng Atomization Service (later renamed Yuan Service) cards, Huawei Payment and other aspects.
In August 2023, Huawei launched the "Hongfei Plan" (Hongmeng Ecological Partner Development Plan) to provide resource support to Hongmeng native adaptation partners.
By August 2023, more than 2.2 million developers have invested in the development of Hongmeng Ecosystem, and there are more than 700 million Hongmeng Ecosystem devices. This is also the confidence for Huawei to comprehensively promote the development of Hongmeng native applications. In addition, Huawei's Mate60 series has fired a key shot in the return of mobile phones, car sales have increased by leaps and bounds, and annual revenue has returned to 700 billion yuan, all of which are laying a solid foundation for the development of Hongmeng Ecosystem.
Thousands of sails are rising in Hongmeng, and the overall ecological situation is decided
In the past two months, mainstream applications in 18 fields, including Alipay, Meituan, Amap, Bilibili, Bank of China, China UnionPay, Air China, and Genshin Impact, have successively joined the development ranks of Hongmeng native applications; Apps such as Xiaohongshu, iQiyi, and Flush have completed the development of beta versions of Hongmeng native applications; Apps such as Hangluzongheng and 360 Browser have also completed the development of core versions of Hongmeng native applications.
Echoing mainstream applications, Internet "old money" people have expressed their opinions.
Zhang Chaoyang, chairman of Sohu Group, asserted in his New Year's Eve speech that "Hongmeng will lead the next round of changes in operating systems." Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of 360 Group, even publicly supports Huawei, "I will support Huawei under any circumstances. I believe that Hongmeng will become the largest operating system in China, and Hongmeng native will succeed."
In terms of talents, Hongmeng developers have bucked the trend and become popular in the recruitment market.In addition to the officially announced cooperation companies urgently recruiting Hongmeng developers, companies that have not yet officially announced such as Byte, Baidu, and WPS are also quietly disclosing Hongmeng developer position information. The treatment of Hongmeng developers is generally better than the market average.
The positive incentives from the market have made the developer community more enthusiastic, and the number of Hongmeng developer registrations even increased by 10,000 in a single day. It is not difficult to imagine that as manufacturers further expand recruitment and more Hongmeng developers enter, the number and richness of Hongmeng native applications will accelerate.
But in the long run, one of the most important points is "talent thickness." While continuing to promote the joint training of developers by universities, more and more universities and students are embracing the Hongmeng ecosystem.
According to statistics, 23 985 universities and 46 211 universities, including Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, etc., have or will soon offer Harmony-related courses. Nanjing University has opened a "Mobile Internet Software Engineering" course, using HarmonyOS as the core of the course, replacing the original Android development course.
The "Long March" is almost reaching its destination, and Huawei will work with its partners to take the lead in shaping a new ecosystem.
Zhu Yonggang, President of Huawei Terminal Cloud Services, previously stated that today’s Hongmeng ecosystem is not Huawei’s solo effort, but a collaboration of like-minded ecosystem members such as partners, developers, universities, and users. “Mountains and seas are not far away from those who share the same ideals.” We have sufficient reasons to believe:
Hongmeng Ecology, the long march of thousands of miles has seen the light of day! !