While the US has softened the Huawei trade ban by allowing American companies to do business with Huawei again, the Chinese firm is still on the US Commerce Department’s Entities List. And now it seems like the company is not banking on being readded to Android family.
Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei has come out and said that their upcoming mobile operating system – the HongMeng OS will “likely” be faster than Android. In an interview with Le Point, Zhengfei revealed that HongMeng OS will be a means to reduce the dependence of Google’s Android and will be 60 percent faster than Android.
Zhengfei also added that Huawei’s mobile OS will be more efficient than Apple’s PC-based macOS. The company CEO said that HongmengOS will boast of less than 5ms delay in processing. The OS will be designed not just for smartphone also for network switches, routers, tablets, computers and data centres.
Zhengfei also conceded that while such an OS is likely to be faster, it needs to come up with a serious alternative to the Google Play Store if its plans to use a different OS altogether is to succeed.
The latest comments from the Huawei CEO suggests that even though Huawei has gained back some support, the company is likely to roll out its own mobile OS in the future, even if all restrictions do get lifted.
In another interview by CNBC, Ren Zhengfei has also revealed that Huawei aims to one day be as good as Apple for protecting the privacy of its users. Zhengfei said Huawei would never provider users’ data to the Chinese government.
On the matter of user data and whether the company would provide the Chinese government with the data, Zhengfei said “We will never do such a thing. If I had done it even once, the US would have evidence to spread around the world. Then the 170 countries and regions in which we currently operate would stop buying our products, and our company would collapse. Data is owned by our customers, not us. Carriers have to track every user, otherwise, no phone calls could be made. It’s a carrier’s duty to track user data. We, as an equipment provider, don’t track any data”.