Exclusive | Inside Huawei’s secretive plans to develop an operating system to rival Google’s Android
- The OS issue took an extra urgency after the US government in mid-May placed Huawei and its affiliates on a trade blacklist
- One of the biggest technical challenges for the Huawei OS under development has been its compatibility with Android, people say
Seven years ago, in a villa facing a lake in Shenzhen, a small group of top Huawei Technologies executives headed by founder Ren Zhengfei held a closed-door meeting that lasted for several days.
Their mission was to brainstorm ideas on how Huawei should respond to the rising success of Google’s Android smartphone operating system (OS) around the world – software that it used on its own handsets. The underlying concern was that dependence on Android could render the company vulnerable to a US ban in the future.
The group agreed that Huawei should build a proprietary OS as a potential alternative to Android, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the information is private.
This meeting was later called the “lakeside talks” internally and access to documents relating to the gathering became highly restricted last year, the sources said.
Following the talks and direction from senior management, a specialist OS team led by executives including Eric Xu Zhijun, currently one of the three rotating chairmen for Huawei, was established and began to work on an OS under conditions of tight secrecy.
A specialised zone was created inside Huawei to house the OS team, with guards on the door. Only employees on the OS team had access to the specialist area, which was accessed with registered staff cards. Personal mobile phones were not allowed and had to be kept in an outside locker.
