It's not clear whether this will be Android API compatible? If it's not, I'm sure it'll be successful given the size of the local market, but it's going to create a real schism for services – will Netflix produce a HarmonyOS app? Maybe that won't be a problem, but it'll probably further cement the separate Chinese ecosystem on the web, and create more work for local companies who will now need to support 3 mobile platforms.
If it is Android compatible, those issues will go away and I could see this taking off externally. Huawei phones are popular in many countries (not the US) as they're cheap and reasonable quality for the price, even if they have had scandal after scandal. Many consumers won't really care about the backstory.
Edit: sounds from other comments like it will not be Android API compatible.
> Huawei phones are popular in many countries (not the US) as they're cheap and reasonable quality for the price, even if they have had scandal after scandal. Many consumers won't really care about the backstory.
Sounds like they’re cheap in price but high in cost.
HarmonyOS will not support Android apps accordingly to the latest news. So, know you have to "only" build thousands of apps to be on par with iOS and Android. I'm pretty sure there will be at least major China apps like TikTok and WeChat. Will there be Google Maps? Messenger? Probably not in the nearest time. Might end up in the same place as BadaOS, webOS, Windows Phone OS and others.
You don’t need thousands of apps. People don’t use thousands of apps day to day. They use the core system apps plus a few top social media apps and perhaps some banking stuff. It’s not 2010 anymore when all of the earnings calls for $AAPL and $GOOG were all about the number of apps on their respective app stores. The web has been highly consolidated since then and the average user only visits a handful of websites/apps. China also has the super app culture — their entire life is on WeChat so that’s really all they need.
I hate comments like these. I assume it gives some people who are Apple-loyal some smug satisfaction, but it's incredibly easy to win a bad faith argument against yourself.
There are so many things you could unpack, like for example, the fact that building an ecosystem costs so much now literally because you have to compete with Apple and Google, or, for example, that I don't actually think the issue at hand is how much Apple "deserves" to be able to charge for building an ecosystem, though I'm sure if it came down to it, "30% of nearly all monetary transactions for literally forever on most phones in the U.S." is not the value most people would come to.
I know there's going to be some temptation to argue about that, but sincerely, please don't. It's just not the point. My point really is, why? This thread didn't even have anything to do with this other than being about app distribution.
Hey I appreciate the dislike of comments like this, thanks for engaging with points rather than snark.
FWIW I'm not trying to take either side, it's a complex, nuanced topic. But, HN isn't very good at nuance, and I was intending to make a comment on the conflicting viewpoints that many seem to hold, which is a far more interesting situation to me than the specifics of this situation.
You're right that part of the cost of building an ecosystem now is competing with the incumbents, although I'm sure you could make this argument throughout history with different incumbents, if at a smaller scale.
There is an incredible amount of trivialization packed into the phrase "monetize your clone of candy crush" when referring to the App Store which has tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year.
But it's worse, because it impacts you even if you're not an app developer. Even when you think you're paying other people, Google and Apple often assert that it has a right to the cut, like joining a YouTube membership. When apps are pushed to use IAPs with a cut, you wind up paying more and having less of it go to the intended recipient, and because apps are limited on what they're allowed to communicate, they can't really adequately warn you that this is going to happen. Some smaller apps wherein the IAP cut seriously doesn't make sense, more along the lines of banking, wind up having to just give up altogether on accepting payments, because they simply don't have the power to fight Apple and Google when they get wrongly rejected.
App stores that don't even let you tell people they're being ripped off by app store policies feel like things that people in "hacker" culture would not be apt to defend as good even if they believe it is completely legal, and I sincerely wonder how this became the norm for a lot of people.
I think people making apps with infinite IAP are the scourge of modern society. People here on HN complain about SaaS software and the eternal renter mentality, but the IAP is not thought of in the same manner strikes me as odd. So with that said, we'll probably never see eye to eye on this topic.
I'm not really sure how that applies to the examples I gave, of which the main ones are basically the same idea as Patreon and have nothing to do with those IAP practices.
I'm also not sure why some of these transactions potentially being scummy makes it any better the way Apple and Google control the markets. If anything, they're profiting hand-over-fist from it and absolutely encouraging it.
China de-risking from US controlled internet is really ambitious - if they pull it off, it might become the only country that achieves digital sovereignty. I expect Russia, Iran and other designated enemies of the US to try and follow suit but no other has the domestic market size to pull it off. Whatever, we think of the geopolitics, it's a fascinating experiment
Russia for sure have to try it, but lost all of their manufacturing outside of military after post Soviet collapse. Don't see anyone else who could do it
it is the great hope of open source that it can under cut political conflict by creating and demonstrating a superior way of interacting. We owe software engineering community a great deal for this!
We tell a country you can no longer use our toys. You've been sanctioned! They develop their own toys that threaten to infiltrate us and the rest of the world - much in the same way the original toys do.
We forced them to learn to fish on their own. They are no longer bound to us.
Maybe Michael Corleone was right when he said... "keep your friends close but your enemies closer."
They didn't develop their own toys, they just stole the toys that others open-sourced. Considering that this behavior is not market driven, although a special(if not monstrous) ecosystem could be formed, I don't think the quality of the apps in that system is sufficient for it to expand into any normal market.
Stole their toys? The west, lured in by cheap manufacturing and labor, handed its precious IP over to them on a silver platter and got so greedy it deindustrialized itself. Must have thought they were the world's bosses or something. Meanwhile China got rich, industrialized and militarized. The west has only itself to blame.
The US and its brethren better wake up and smell the coffee or they will share the fate of the british empire.
The past five years were enough to teach the West to pull out of China and move manufacturing and investment dollars to India, Vietnam, and Mexico.
Mexico is going to be the near-shoring super hub for America, and Texas is going to be an incredible beneficiary of that switch. Many analysts are saying this will push Texas GDP over that of California.
China didn't have enough time to develop a strong domestic consumer base, and now it's seeing a pull back from international buyers as it simultaneously has to contend with massive economic issues at home.
America, meanwhile, has a ten-plus year lead on semiconductors and the burgeoning AI field. It basically got to reap the upside of cheap Chinese manufacturing while it lasted and keep all the best for itself. Now it's actively re-configuring the world's supply chains. You can see America making big changes to worldwide shipping and energy, too. Even OPEC is powerless to control pricing now. And as an added bonus, America feels re-invigorated by competition and is pushing itself to work harder.
I wouldn't shed a single tear for America. It got exactly what it wanted and is moving on from the relationship.
Compared to what? China is building thousands of kilometers of high speed rail seemingly every year. They’re expanding their power through trade agreements rather than military force. They can manufacture whatever they want.
From where I am sitting it looks like China keeps growing while the US declines. Our economy is so broken people can’t afford rent, school and medical debt are skyrocketing, our planes keep falling apart, we have the highest prison population ever, mass shootings keep happening, and more and more Americans are living in cars.
I think it only looks fine to us because we’re too xenophobic to look outside our borders and see how different things could be.
> From where I am sitting it looks like China keeps growing while the US declines
That just sounds like you're ignorant about what is happening in China.
The economy is in perilous shape after they allowed a completely unregulated financial sector to finance the property sector. Now there are major contagion fears as well as what the impact to consumers will be given 70% of household wealth comes from property.
Combined with a very low birth rate, rapid ageing and decreasing manufacturing competitiveness due to high costs the country is in serious trouble. Far worse than the US.
I've heard their economy is in perilous shape for years now. The people speaking of the 'coming collapse of china's economy' seem just like perma-bears here.
These assumptions have shown to be wrong, time and time again, but surely the collapse is coming right, if we believe hard enough?
Agreed. I think there’s a lot of people in the US that want to hear stories of China's failure, so the stories are written. Even if they do have a recession, that’s not the end of the world for any other major power it won’t be for China either.
And how many times has the US economy faltered? Most recently 2000, 2008, 2020. And yet we’re “doing fine” but when China’s economy has trouble it’s somehow a sign of China’s failure. I think western reports of China’s failure sell newspapers, but China’s done pretty well for itself the last 20 years. I suspect they will navigate through this recession no worse than western powers have time and time again. According to Wikipedia the US has had as many as 48 recessions. That’s not what led to our present stagnation.
Irresponsible financial sector constantly crashing the economy with their unbacked loans? Insufficient birth rates causing devastating demographical changes in nations, from young economically active workers into retired geriatric population which demands extremely costly healthcare and welfare? The inevitable mass immigration that supposedly solves the demographic problem but ends up creating numerous new ones?
Am I reading this right? By that logic the entire western developed world has been dead and buried for a long time now.
> China is building thousands of kilometers of high speed rail seemingly every year.
Many analysts state this has been overbuilt to the point of being gross malinvestment [1-6, etc]. All of those miles require tremendous and costly annual upkeep, and the ridership numbers won't adequately subsidize these costs.
> They’re expanding their power through trade agreements rather than military force. They can manufacture whatever they want.
The results of this remain to be seen. eg. they're dumping cheap EVs on Europe because their domestic market is saturated for Chinese products; meanwhile, the West is pulling back from trade.
> From where I am sitting it looks like China keeps growing while the US declines.
The US is hardly declining. US GDP growth is an astounding 6%, which is almost unprecedented for a developed economy. The rest of your assessment feels like progressive political talking points. Moderates and conservatives would feel very differently.
> we’re too xenophobic
It's xenophobic to have an ill outlook on the Chinese economy? What if one maintains a positive outlook on the Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican economies? Or Taiwanese? Is that xenophobic?
Their overtures towards India are especially interesting. India was once the crown jewel of the british empire, they achieved their independence not even a century ago and have since developed into a nuclear power capable of putting man-made objects on the moon.
India is not stupid and I'm willing to bet Mexico and Vietnam aren't either. They'll only be too happy to accept western money in order to further industrialize and strengthen themselves.
The expectations that those countries won't be able to take on US like China is doing right now, and be forever slaves of whatever US economy requires of them.
I think you need to re-read my comment. I don't know what you're on about.
These countries are on a rapid rise, fueled by their own domestic growth. None of them are subjugated to the US or the West. Lots of new factories are being built and investors are now pouring in capital.
America has elected to trade more closely. It would be stupid not to.
> reselling most open-source code is theft under the licenses in common use.
That doesn't sound like any OSS license in common use; and one of the freedoms that FOSS licenses preserve is the freedom to sell software. Which license do you think they're in violation of?
> maybe, but on this forum of rather clever people, I assume people mean what they say.
That is a bad assumption. People often mis-speak and there is nothing that protects against that. When people make a claim that isn't true, it is prudent to seek clarification in the first instance to prevent misunderstandings. Particularly when dealing with cross-cultural institutions where the management presumably speak Chinese.
>reselling most open-source code is theft under the licenses in common use.
Free-as-in-libre is different from free-as-in-beer.
However, I do agree when the majority of FOSS consumers speak of it the F stands for free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-libre, and tar and feather anyone who would dare pay or take money.
> They broke the license. It's theft, in the same way as raping a prostitute is theft.
It's called copyright infringement. A completely non-violent act, violation of a contract essentially, one that subtracts nothing from either party. It's disgusting to see you put this and rape in the same sentence as if these things were in any way analogous.
whoa. not even in the same reality of being comparable. what a shit example. if you think rape is something to just toss out as some techbro example, then you really have some growing up to do. even a prostitute has the right to say no, and you damn well better respect that. anything after no is rape regardless of their profession.
Yes, it's worse than theft. That's the point I'm making. They're not just taking something that doesn't belong to them, they're taking credit and using it against the presumable interest of the creator. It's obviously not a violation of bodily autonomy, but it is a small-r rape, similar to how a pillaging can be described as a rape.
The comparison stems for abusing something people presume to be open, which I think is apt. The social attitudes do not reflect reality.
I've never heard of pillaging being described as rape. They often happen in conjunction with each other which is why the phrase "rape & pillage" is prevalent. However, it comes across to me as someone trying to downplay rape into something less than what it is. To toss it around so non-nonchalantly has got to stop.
I'm not even willing to engage in the rest of your argument as part of this thread. I don't care if you're using lower case, upper case or writing in Sanskrit.
Please re-read my original comment. You're allowing the semantic overload of the word affect your judgement of my statement, which I think you'd agree with in principle.
“semantic overload” just goes to prove how techbro you are to even think that using rape so casually is just something to be dismissed rather than owning up to the serious lack of awareness and classless you are. You chose to be very unclassy with that choice of phrasing. Then, doubled down on it by continuing to diminish it and blame me for misinterpreting your classlessness.
I am a farmer who spends my 9-5 writing websites, often in PHP. I'm the farthest you can get from a techbro, and you'll find no apology or regret here, because I don't care if you're offended by me being "unclassy". I have a position, and whinging about it is counterproductive.
I love how the general tone is "information is free!" unless of course when the one benefitting from it is China, in which case everyone suddenly gets out their magnifying glasses and GPL licenses.
For what it's worth in practical terms, I can't tell you if everyone in China complies with every license, but Huawei is one of the largest contributors to the linux kernel and several open source projects.
These conversations are always interesting in these type of US-centric forums: You can really see the "patriotism" that emanates from these conversations: China BAD, US Good and exactly what you mention: Free for me but not for thee.
As someone from a third world country it is like watching two bullies fight each other in the school. Well, both of them spy on me, both of them abuse me (I'm Mexican) and both of them think they are always right. For me, both of them are pretty similar.
> I love how the general tone is "information is free!" unless of course when the one benefitting from it is China, in which case everyone suddenly gets out their magnifying glasses and GPL licenses.
I have _never_ gotten the "information is free!" vibe from HN. That was like 80s/90s hacker culture, not 2020s HN. There's a lot of devs and business people here, neither of which are fond of licenses being abused in general.
China has a long and well-documented history of IP theft. So the doubt is legitimate.
And they have to contribute to Linux and other open source projects in order to have an Android-compatible operating system. At some point you need to either fix bugs or add features to support your own hardware. But this shouldn't be seen as altruism.
It would be lovely if anyone could bother assessing HarmonyOS on the grounds it takes itself on, rather than these endless vapid articles discussing it only as it compares to Android.
HarmonyOS begat China's first ministry of open source, where all the big names lined up behind OpenAtom foundation, to carry the work forward. There's ongoing efforts in tons of sectors to use the technology: mobile of course, but also in-vehicle, medical, energy and industrial. There's a neat LiteOS based low kernel that integrates with the ecosystem,Linux, and now microkernels that can run Linux compatibility layers semi-alooe Fuschia.
The UI system is a pretty interesting thing extending TypeScript, ArkUI, with a very complete integrative ark tool.
What I find really unique and compelling is the DSoftBus, which is a kind of semi-automatic distributed object layer that apps more or less get built on by default. In theory, it should be a fantastic uniquotous & pervasive computing layer, where apps and devices by default can be accessed and controlled without the app or controller having to custom code the effort; many of the advantages of something like grpc but with automatic networking & not having to think about the effort, with distributed objects being more normal.
The Android story is so boring. Android is boring. Android has done almost nothing of interest for a decade anyways: like most OS it is still & subservient, barely present, letting apps run the show. It's such a boring story to discuss HarmonyOS on compare to another boring unmoving bland OS doing nothing. HarmonyOS has some interesting actual change its working for, and we should be actually diving into that, rather than this persistently bland ass coverage. Even The Reg fails to unearth a single notable useful thing to say.
I wish coverage were better. Alas Huawei requires a passport photo & bank information to sign up for the very powerful dev account. There's the OpenHarmony code available on the state run gitee, but there's very little help on how to assemble & turn the dozens of repos into anything usable, alas. And it seems like HarmonyOS Next is much more prosperity than the OpenAtom OpenHarmony efforts, further confounding assessment. Still, it seems like while some layers like the kernel might change, it seems like continuity will be maintained on many levels like DSoftBus
and ArkUI. It'd be worthwhile to actually dig in & understand merit here, especially given how bereft & unmoving OSes have been on all other fronts; Android support is not particularly interesting. https://gitee.com/openharmony
Android was interesting in the begining (minus Google screwing up Sun and not being there to collect the prize), however the way they started pushing Kotlin while bashing Java (which Kotlin depends on to exist, alongside Android Studio and Gradle, what an irony), kind of killed by motivation about the platform.
Every time I see these kinds of achievements from the Chinese, I am vindicated when I tell the Chinamageddon hysterics to stop wasting my damn time and go get bent[1].
Now yes, there's probably a whole damn lot of artistic license and hot air in these achievements, but the old saying goes that smoke doesn't rise where there is no fire.
>Every time I see these kinds of achievements from the Chinese, I am vindicated when I tell the Chinamageddon hysterics to stop wasting my damn time and go get bent[1].
So you've decided to completely ignore their birth rate numbers? Because "achievements like these" will mean absolutely nothing for their capitalist economy when their population shrinks to 25% of current numbers. And that's ignoring the whole fact that the second they stop being a cheap source of labor, the west will look elsewhere (which they've already started to do).
You can't "centrally plan" your way out of young people not wanting to reproduce.
You're talking about discouraging people from having children, which is (relatively) easy. There's yet to be a government that's figured out how to make any parent want to waste 18 years of their life raising a child that they don't otherwise want. You can't punish someone into raising a kid. You can fairly easily make the punishment great enough to discourage them.
> You're talking about discouraging people from having children, which is (relatively) easy. There's yet to be a government that's figured out how to make any parent want to waste 18 years of their life raising a child that they don't otherwise want. You can't punish someone into raising a kid.
Almost everyone wants to have children if the conditions are right; the handful of misanthropes who don't are irrelevant. The reasons people choose not to are things that are eminently addressable by a government; risk that it will damage their career, fear they won't be able to support their children materially, or that they'll make damaging mistakes when raising them.
You really think they are above forcing pregnancies? They could quite easily install some sort of Handmaid's Tale situation. They have the perfect government for it.
Don't be ridiculous. They can easily mitigate the birthrate issue by bringing in lots of immigrants. Billions of people would absolutely love to live in China! /s
If it is Android compatible, those issues will go away and I could see this taking off externally. Huawei phones are popular in many countries (not the US) as they're cheap and reasonable quality for the price, even if they have had scandal after scandal. Many consumers won't really care about the backstory.
Edit: sounds from other comments like it will not be Android API compatible.