Huawei's HongMeng operating system will be revealed this week, suggest reports from China

Honor-branded smart TVs and smartphones expected to be the first to run Huawei's HongMeng operating system

Huawei is expected to unveil its HongMeng operating system this week at a developer event in China. The operating system has been in development since 2012, ostensibly for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

That's according to China's Global Times newspaper that claims that the operating system - which could be branded 'Harmony' - will run on Honor-branded smart TVs, as well as 2000 renminbi (£235) Honor smartphones coming to market before the end of the year.

The news that Huawei is rushing out its HongMeng operating system for smartphones comes contrary to statements made by Huawei officials only last month,

The operating system and devices running HongMeng will showed off at Huawei's Developer Conference in Dongguan, Guangdong province, on Friday 9^th August, Global Times suggests.

According to Global Times, the operating system will be able to run Android apps, which presumably means cloning a Java-based run-time environment in a similar way that BlackBerry did with its ill-fated BlackBerry 10 operating system from version 10.2. The report also indicates that the operating system will encrypt data on-device as standard.

Reports in China suggesting that other Chinese vendors, including Xiaomi and Oppo, will adopt HongMeng have been denied by the vendors.

Huawei's HongMeng push has intensified in recent weeks as the expectation of a compromise in the two countries' trade dispute faded.

Huawei was slapped with US sanctions on 15^th May when the Trump administration added Huawei, and 70 of its foreign subsidiaries and affiliates of Huawei, to the US government's entity list under the Export Administration Regulations. This requires US suppliers - and, effectively, any organisation with US trade interests - to apply for an export licence before supplying a named entity.

The justification for this was Huawei's role in re-exporting US technology embedded within Huawei products to Iran, contrary to US sanctions.

However, this move followed more than a year of rising tensions between the US government and China over trade, and with Chinese telecoms equipment makers in particular. ZTE was almost driven out of business after violating the terms of a settlement with the US Department of Commerce over exporting telecoms equipment containing US parts to Iran.

The Trump administration has also effectively banned Huawei from US mobile and fixed line networks, and pressured mobile operators into withdrawing Huawei smartphones.

The immediate effect of the May sanctions was the withdrawal of operating system licences for both Android and Windows.

While the US government quickly rowed back, offering Huawei a 90-day stay of execution, a recent deterioration of relations between the US and China has made Huawei's future access to US technology more uncertain. Huawei embeds a variety of US-sourced products into its smartphones and communications hardware and will struggle to find suitable alternatives for them.