Despite the ongoing U.S. trade ban preventing Huawei from doing business with American companies like Google, Huawei has been able to ship devices with an unlicensed version of the popular Android operating system. That said, there’s no sign of Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, or the Google Play Store, but Huawei smartphones still offer settings and features that fans who love the Android platform are still quite familiar with.
However, that will soon change. Huawei was busy developing its own operating system called HarmonyOS, which will replace Android in the future. And now, after a few years of testing and tweaking, Huawei seems ready to completely replace Android with this brand new software.
Huawei confirmed that Harmony OS will power some devices starting April, which means Google and its Android software will soon be less dependent. There’s no official word on an exact date when this update will take place, but we may now know which phone will be the first to receive this monumental change.
A report discovered on Chinese social media platform Weibo and published by GizChina suggests that the new Huawei P50 series – a successor to the Huawei P40 – will be the first handset to hit the Harmony OS immediately brings. This means that these phones will completely disconnect from Google and owners will not be able to access apps like Gmail, Google Maps or Google Drive.
According to Counterpoint Research’s Market Pulse Service, OPPO’s market share reached 21 percent in January, making it the top spot in China. To make things worse for Huawei, Vivo secured 20 percent of the market and left the company in third place along with Apple and Xiaomi.
Incredibly, OPPOs’ sales increased 33 percent month-on-month and 26 percent year-over-year in the first month of 2021. Varun Mishra, Senior Analyst at Counterpoint Research, said of the new statistics and the surge in OPPO: “OPPO has successfully repositioned its product lines in 2020. Renaming the Reno series and introducing a more powerful device at a lower price point than its predecessor has helped OPPO break into the affordable premium segment. “
