Hongmeng OS is not designed for smartphones, says Huawei's senior vice president

Huawei wants to continue using Google's Android for smartphones

Huawei's upcoming Hongmeng operating system is not designed to run on smartphones, and it was never intended to replace Google's Android operating system.

That's according to Huawei's senior vice president Catherine Chen, who told reporters in Brussels that the company actually wants to continue using Google's Android for its smartphones.

According to Chinese news agency Xinhua, Chen said that Hongmeng is a highly secure operating system that is being developed for industrial use only. It contains fewer lines of code - just hundreds of thousands - compared to full-fledged mobile OS that contain millions of lines of codes, Chen added.

Chen's latest statement is a marked departure from Huawei executives' earlier statements, which suggested that the company was developing Hongmeng as an alternative to Google's Android OS.

"Huawei is in the process of potentially launching a replacement," Huawei's communications vice president Andrew Williamson told Reuters in June.

Williamson also stated that the new operating system would be ready "in months" in case Huawei is blocked by Google.

Earlier this month, Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei said that Huawei's supposedly forthcoming mobile operating system will be much faster than Android and will be able to run on a variety of devices.

Chen's comments imply that Huawei has either changed its earlier strategy to use Hongmeng to run its smartphones, or it is working on some other mobile platform as an alternative to Android.

Last week, Huawei's chairman Liang Hua also stated that Hongmeng was mainly designed for embedded, IoT-style devices.

"[Huawei hasn't] decided yet if the Hongmeng OS can be developed as a smartphone operating system in the future," Liang said, according to TechNode.

Talk about Hongmeng started in May after the US government banned Huawei from doing business in the US - without suppliers first obtaining a licence from the US Department of Commerce. The move also applies to services and software, affecting Huawei's continued use of Microsoft Windows in laptops and desktop computers, as well as Android in mobile phones and tablet computers.

Google quickly withdrew Huawei's right to use Google services in Android - Android being open-source, but the value in the operating system to customers being access to services like Google Play and Google Maps.

However, business between two companies resumed after the US government suspended its trade restrictions for three months, and there is a possibility that they could be lifted altogether.

Last month, some reports claimed that Huawei had filed applications in at least nine countries to trademark its mobile OS. Those countries included: Canada, Cambodia, South Korea, New Zealand and Peru, as well as the EU and UK.

At that time, it was also suggested - based on the information obtained from United Nations World Intellectual Property Organisation (WPIO) - that Huawei planned to use its operating system in multiple devices, ranging from smartphones and portable computers to robots and car televisions.

In China, Huawei had reportedly applied to the intellectual property administration in August 2018, receiving confirmation in May this year.

Building a new mobile operating system from scratch, with all the drivers working correctly, a user interface that consumers are comfortable with, and an app store with a reasonable number of apps in is no small task.

It took BlackBerry the best part of four years to build BlackBerry 10, the mobile OS based on QNX, which the company acquired in 2010. The first BlackBerry 10 device was launched in 2013, but it took another year or so for the operating system to be brought up to par.