Hongmeng OS was often tipped to be a replacement of Android for Huaweis smartphones, but apparently, the company had other plans. Catherine Chen, board member and VP at the company, stated the OS was never intended to replace Android – it is developed for business uses and IoT.
Catherine Chen, Huawei board member and Senior Vice President
Chen revealed the information at a media roundtable in Brussels, Belgium. The Hongmeng OS was recently trademarked, but it was always intended for industrial use and has been in development long before the discussions about replacing Android, following the trade war between the United States and China.
It appears the Hongmeng OS contains much fewer lines of code – hundreds of thousands, instead of dozens of millions like the mobile operating systems. Huaweis in-house OS also has extremely low latency compared with a smartphone operating system, Chen added.
Although this might be the truth, it is worth noticing that Chinese officials started speaking about the Hongmeng OS once the US government decided to lift the trade ban from Huawei, leaving the presumption there couldve been considerations about making it a mobile system after all.