6 ms·

I think it's too late, they already have planned to fork from Android for years, this (potentially permanent) ban just motivated them to speed up the process.

• devoply 7y ago
  Huawei is not an advertising company. They could use a completely different approach to openness and privacy and eat Google's lunch in the current climate... if they were wise and not trying to be authoritarian or controlling. And considering Google basically privatized Linux, I would not see this as being a bad outcome... to make Android a Linux based system open source and community driven again. As over time Google is planning on abandoning its Linux roots and moving it to what was called Fuschia.
  • hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players? I would argue that everyone after the top two is such a huge way behind that they really only serve niche markets. Look at Windows Phone, which eventually ended up being a pretty nice OS. MS couldn't pay people enough, quite literally, to get developers to build for it. Any "non-Google Android" clone is going to have to deal with the way developers are deep into Google Play Services, at least in the West, and that will be extremely difficult to displace.
    • devoply 7y ago
      Maybe. But really displacing any of those services is maybe 10,000 developers away... we already have F-droid what if you co-opted it to publish commercial apps for no fees. What if you set 10,000-20,000 developers to work on an open source fork that was run by the Linux foundation? What if you made a real effort to make it truly open source and free? Would people jump ship? It's possible. No one has tried or had the resources to try. And Google becomes more and more entrenched.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        “Publish commercial apps for no fees”? Processing payments costs real money. Who should subsidize it to make it free for publishers?
        • devoply 7y ago
          Let's see 3% payment cost vs 30% fees... If they wanted to just charge the transaction cost. And yes there are cost centers and profit centers. If you want to eat the cost of something you could do it. And once it becomes successful maybe you start raising fees slowly to catch up to that 30%. Many strategies are possible.
          • scarface74 7y ago
            And are the employees suppose to work for free?
    • bduerst 7y ago
      Yes. Blackberry in mobile OS share had it for a while, though I'm sure you'd argue that it doesn't exist anymore, but you had asked about ever, not just right now. Video game consoles are another example, with the Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation. In just about every market there exists two natural economic leaders - the quantity (a.k.a. cost) and the quality leaders. There are market leaders other than the natural two who can arise through other means, such as ecosystem lock-in, tech patents, brand exclusivity, or some other method.
    • adrianN 7y ago
      Chinese companies always have the Chinese market where they can grow until they're important enough that people want to be compatible with them.
      • adventured 7y ago
        It doesn't actually work that way. If it did, Baidu would have half the global market for search. Instead, they've stagnated after maxing out in China and Google has continued to expand globally. Ctrip (20 years old) doesn't have a consequential business outside of China, where Booking and others are dominant. Ctrip's business is firewalled inside of China. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram dominate globally, while eg WeChat has stagnated outside of China. WeChat's growth started to flatline about three years ago. Within another year they'll go entirely flat on growth (stalled at just over a billion monthly active users, most of which are in China and a few other countries). Spotify and Apple own the global streaming music business. China's competitors are heavily domestic. Netflix, Amazon and Disney (+Hulu) will own the global streaming movies & TV business. Almost nobody outside of China listens to or can understand Chinese music, movies or TV shows. Outside of China it's a small market for their media content. This is a fundamental that can't be overcome, the world is not going to learn Mandarin. On video gaming, China can never compete because there's a vast amount of content the Chinese Government will simply never allow. They barely allow their own video game giants like Tencent to function properly within China, it's a nightmare. The gaming segment will continue to be dominated by the US, Europe and Japan. As in the other cases, China's gaming companies are hamstrung by their system. The best they can do is buy foreign assets and try to operate them outside of China. When it comes to social, China can never compete due to their extreme speech, cultural & political controls. There can be no global Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, et al. China's regressive approach is so extreme they've banned joke apps - that one ban probably wipes out a third of the social media landscape in terms of usage. You never have to worry about a Chinese company competing with you if you're eg Imgur or Twitter. There is some potential for shopping & goods trade, however even mighty Alibaba has struggled in their quest for expanding outside of the domestic Chinese market.
        • throwmex 7y ago
    • ssivark 7y ago
      And yet China has parallel search engines, chat platforms, e-commerce platforms and social networks. A billion people make a big enough target audience to enable a lot of things.
      • toxik 7y ago
        Rofl, none of the Chinese copies are better than their originals. The only reason there are Chinese variants is protectionism a la firewall.
        • usaar333 7y ago
          That's not entirely true. WeChat in many ways is more impressive than whatever US equivalent is for a Chinese audience. And Didi executed far better than Uber without protectionism being in play. It's nontrivial to execute in a foreign culture to your own.
          • joejerryronnie 7y ago
            Didi may have executed better than Uber, but there was pretty significant informal protectionism going on, as well.
          • DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
            Indeed, Chinese apps have diverged significantly from what's used in the West. There were a bunch of Chinese copycat apps at first, but some of them have been supplanted by new and very different apps. Everyone in China used to be on a Facebook copycat called "Ren Ren," but it's gone the way of MySpace, and everyone is now on WeChat, which has no equivalent in the West.
            • c256 7y ago
              > WeChat, which has no equivalent in the West Facebook has been very transparent recently about their intent to ‘fix’ this.
        • 7y ago
    • laumars 7y ago
      Before smartphones monopolised the market, there was a good variety of handsets to choose from (still is if you look at things from a hardware perspective). Same was true for micro computers all throughout the 80s and up to mid 90s. Games consoles, cars, TVs, laptop OEMs, enterprise cloud hosting providers, etc. So plenty of counter examples.
    • zrm 7y ago
      > For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players? Here's a partial list of major server operating system vendors over the years: IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft ... Everyone one of those has existed since at least the 1990s and it's rare for the largest individual vendor to have more than 30% share at any given time. The key to maintaining this is common interfaces. You write against POSIX or Qt or Java and it runs on most systems even though they're all different vendors. But all of that stuff comes from the little guys. All the Unix vendors got together to create POSIX because then developers get access to more users by targeting POSIX than Win32, even though Windows at the time had more market share than any individual Unix. Sun creating Java allowed developers with mostly Windows customers to write their Windows applications in Java, which then gave them Mac and a dozen other platforms for free, including Sun Solaris, which the developer probably wouldn't have targeted on its own. The phone hardware vendors could take a page out of that book and create their own modern POSIX for mobile to replace the Google-specific APIs on Android. Heck, they would only need one implementation of it, the same as all the old Unix vendors have largely standardized on Linux today.
  • rqs 7y ago
    > if they were wise and not trying to be authoritarian or controlling Well, that IF is how you end your own argument. In China, most of us don't give a deep thought on privacy and personal .* (personal freedom, personal rights etc). Because of this, I don't believe people here would build an OS to protect people's privacy and many other rights. You just don't have the base and market to do that here. I think even if HongmengOS is not just a smoke, the best they could do is probably just a "better" Android "knock off". So I personally don't give that OS any high hope. But I do have a little hope of course. As a Chinese myself, my hope is that their OS can be fully open sourced, so tech communities can learn how to build a OS from them, and maybe later fork it to fit people's own needs (for example: add privacy focused features). My another hope is, maybe in the future, more and more (small) phone manufacturers will start to build phones that could run multiple OSs, like what Purism is trying to do. That way user will have more freedom in terms of choice. Don't know which of my hope is likely to come true, we'll see. (I guess Purism is a better bet because they are making progress as we speak)
• markus_zhang 7y ago
  But National Security is a club everyone swing.
• sandworm101 7y ago
  >> but about Google losing their mobile market share. Under current policy, threats to US industry are threats to national security. That is why Canadian steel was listed as a national security threat. They aren't quiet about these things any more. Cutting into US market share is now openly described as a security threat.
  • xvector 7y ago
    > Under current policy, threats to US industry are threats to national security. Sure, maybe policy-wise, but common-sense wise the argument doesn't hold up at all. Google's minimal loss from business with Huawei is nothing compared to Huawei compromising the 5G infrastructure of the US.
    • tsss 7y ago
      The only question is: Do the people/companies who will be affected by compromised 5G have enough agency and bribe money to out do Google?
    • throwaway34241 7y ago
      I don't understand how those things are related. What does forcing Huawei to fork Android on their cell phones in China and Europe (by totally forbidding them from doing business with Google) have to do with 5G infrastructure in the US? If the US is so concerned, can't they just ban them from 5G infrastructure? Why is it necessary to fork Android?
  • lambdasquirrel 7y ago
    So then, any country that wants to become more economically competitive against the US (even Canada) is a national security threat?
    • 420codebro 7y ago
      Yep. That is the system that currently exists. Especially if said player is an ideological adversary.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  But Huawei would forfeit their non-China market share.
  • threeseed 7y ago
    More likely just US and maybe Five Eyes. Almost all other countries seem to be okay with Huawei and any potential Chinese security threat.
    • cameronbrown 7y ago
      The real problem is American apps like YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat. Any platform without those is stillborn.
      • deeringc 7y ago
        Especially WhatsApp, I would say. It is the absolute standard for communication in much of the world.
        • ben_w 7y ago
          That’s surprising. Nobody has yet asked me for my WhatsApp contact details and thereby forced me to create an account. (Germany, previously UK).
          • reaperducer 7y ago
            Ditto. I've never seen WhatsApp in the wild. I've been asked if I have iMessage and Venmo more times than I can remember, but nobody has ever asked me if I have WhatsApp.
            • mycall 7y ago
              January of 2018. At the time, Zuckerberg said WhatsApp had 1.5 billion monthly active users.