Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

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I mean - developers for your platform have always been a huge driver (something something developers, developers, developers - Balmer).

But I think it's a mistake to assume that the Play Store is equivalent to your developer footprint for a platform.

Google has been fairly insidious about integrating OS level APIs with the Play Store, so that's blurred the line a bit here - but if the OS is otherwise "Android-like" enough that it's just a matter of choosing a different target in your build and linking to different binaries... it'll be very easy to port over the developer base that's interested.

Seems like Harmony is doing exactly that, and already has a large swath of companies that are planning to support the OS - so while some of that is likely because of government influence in this case... it's not required (ex - I'm thinking of Google and the whole lawsuit with Oracle around the Java APIs)

It doesn't matter that you have 90% of all developers supporting your platform, if the final 10% is responsible for the must have apps.

Huawei had a 4% market share last year. Is that going to be enough for something like MobilePay in Scandinavia to ensure that they are present on a platform, from a company and country they don't entirely trust? Without the MobilePay app, the number of people who'd buy the phones drop to almost zero. The same happens if Danes can't use their government ID on the phones, sales drops to almost zero, because the device just lost a major feature.

I don't think it matters that Huawei has a large swath of companies ready to support their OS, it has to be all of them (or at least the right ones).

They might pull it off and get every one on board, but the investment has to be really small to justify the work for such a small user base.

Huawei has 22% market share in China which has its own ecosystem, so apps can be converted. Even for Xiaomi and BBK it will make sense to have few China only Harmony phones to hedge against any action by US against them.

Countries like Iran, Russia can be next target for obvious reasons.

In SEA likes of Grab and Gojek can be financially motivated to create apps. If they get a 4-10% marketshare it will make sense for Meta to port its apps to protect its position.

YouTube will be a blocker as Google has strong reason to not support any alternative platform even if it will make sense for the App. Same happened for Win Phone earlier.

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