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.
I second this is not about US security but about Google losing their mobile market share.
I second this is not about US security 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.
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.
If the US is so concerned, can't they just ban them from 5G infrastructure? Why is it necessary to fork Android?
The US dropped its steel tariffs against Canada and imports ~$325 billion in goods from Canada (equal to ~19% of their economy). Canadian steel represents <2% of that.
Meanwhile the US is going to allow Infineon to buy Cypress, an important US semiconductor company.
The US will have roughly a $21.x trillion economy at the end of 2019. The scale of non-China tariffs is entirely trivial, meaningless. So far there has been very little in the way of actual hits and targeting from tariffs - on the grounds of national security or otherwise - outside of the trade conflict with China.
The response misses the point that the US is saber-rattling to keep other countries in line. China is the only country to actually challenge the US, so now the US has to show everyone who’s boss.
Certain industries. Usually industries that are critical to the functioning of the economy, or that have been concentrated in hostile or semi-hostile nations without alternatives in friendly countries.
Policy, like everything else in life, is a lot more complicated than the internet likes to portray.
Note that I’m not attempting to assert a truth, moral, or effectiveness value for this argument.
The argument that Canada might cut off US access to steel is not plausible. The fact that the Trump administration is using the phrase "national security" to try to wring economic and political concessions out of Canada is transparent.
Almost all other countries seem to be okay with Huawei and any potential Chinese security threat.
I've not once in my life had someone ask for an iMessage, and Venmo I've only heard about online. The last time I sent an SMS was probably a decade ago.
Currently I live in LINE-land. 90% of my communication is on LINE. Among friends abroad, everyone has Facebook messenger but it's nobody's preferred method, rather a fallback. WhatsApp is popular among friends in Europe (Sweden/Spain). Don't know anyone who's mentioned Telegram/Signal.
It hasn't caught on as much in the US.
1. https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
2. https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
1. https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
2. https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
1. https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
2. https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
WhatsApp is the one you needed to mention, if you have that then you are locked into a phone number based service.
Apps can go to PWA mode, if you think of the business case for a third party app going PWA then it is a good one - ease of adoption as no need to install.
If Huawei wanted to they could host videos and offer better monetisation to content creators. If you get notifications that your favourite channels have new stuff does it matter what logo is at the top of the page?
If the deal was a good one to upload the entire back catalogue to HuaweiTube then it could work. People already are used to uploading their blog post to half a dozen different places, no reason why people could not do this with video painlessly on Huawei 5G.
People who release stuff early on Patreon could be customers for this.
If HuaweiTube also allowed you to do images - as per Instagram and messaging all in one neat service (treating images as single frame videos and audio as video with no pictures) then it could be a better service.
I think that WhatsApp is the rub, people can go to the web version of Facebook on a Huawei phone, they don't need the app.
Regardless of the shitty things YouTube's done, there's a reason it's still so popular.
We also really need to preserve the back catalogue. There's so much invaluable stuff only on YouTube.
YouTube isn't massively integrated into other services, if you had one platform that did email, video hosting, Patreon things and still image things then I think it could work.
If the on-boarding is with your device, as per how it is with Android then why could it not work?
The goal posts change all the time. Because MicroSoft failed at it doesn't mean they would fail if they did the same today. Or if some other player did.
As over time Google is planning on abandoning its Linux roots and moving it to what was called Fuschia.
Processing payments costs real money. Who should subsidize it to make it free for publishers?
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.
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.
These two sentence are also not intrinsically linked. Just because there has been protectionism does not mean that the China apps are automatically worse. In fact, a bunch of features of weibo and we chat have found their way to Twitter and WhatsApp. (One example are voice messages which were a core part of wechat from the start. They were important to get people in rural areas or older people to use the app, due to the difficulties of typing Mandarin, especially dialects.)
There is little reason to expect companies that have had multi-national success not to succeed in China if it weren't for protectionism; while there are certainly examples of poor execution, you'd have to be blind to think that was the reason for every such case, or even a significant portion thereof.
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.
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.
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)