Recently, wangchenglu, known as the "father of Hongmeng", was exposed to have left Huawei. On May 23, wangchenglu's personal microblog showed that Huawei certification had been canceled. According to tianyancha data, wangchenglu has become the only member of the core team of Shenzhen KaiHong Digital Industry Development Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "shenkaihong"). A paragraph in his personal profile explains: "in May 2022, Dr. wangchenglu, who once led the development of Hongmeng system, left Huawei and the next stop is Shenzhen KaiHong Digital Industry Development Co., Ltd. (shenkaihong)."
According to public information, shenkaihong was founded on August 26, 2021 and completed Angel round financing in January this year. Tianyancha's equity penetration shows that the shareholders behind shenkaihong include Huawei, ChinaSoft and CIC, and the actual controller is chenyuhong, CEO of ChinaSoft international.
Among the heads of Huawei's many business departments, wangchenglu doesn't have a prominent sense of existence. However, in addition to the Hongmeng system, which is currently the most concerned system, he has also led the research and development of ark compiler and emui. It can be said that Wang Chenglu's career experience runs through the entire development process of Huawei's consumer software department.
Nowadays, the resignation of this veteran inevitably leads to external discussions, especially after the delay of harmony OS 3.0, the outside world is more concerned about whether this system will produce variables.
However, although this personnel change seems to be sudden, there are already signs. At the Huawei Developer Conference on October 22 last year, wangchenglu made his last public appearance. At that time, his position had become president of Huawei's AI and smart full scene business department, and Gong Ti took over as president of Huawei's consumer business software department.
Wangchenglu, who left Huawei, is not far away from Hongmeng. According to various sources, his next stop will be to join Shenzhen KaiHong Industrial Development Co., Ltd. and continue to preside over the development of openharmony.
Since its appearance at the 2019 Huawei developer conference, Hongmeng has borne too much expectation and doubt from the outside world. After the setback of the mobile phone business, Hongmeng not only undertook the task of retaining users during the transition period, but also undertook the strategic task of Huawei facing IOT.
In March last year, wangchenglu said in an interview with the media that the most important task in 2021 is to "make Hongmeng ecological reach 16% of the market share, and the watershed of ecological prosperity must be crossed."
So, when Wang Chenglu left, did Hongmeng cross the line of life and death?
Crossing the line of life and death in one year
Yanghaisong, vice president of AI and full scene Business Department of Huawei's consumer business, previously said in an interview: "what Hongmeng system needs to do is to complete the five-year journey of others in one year."
Now it seems that wangchenglu has done it.
Huawei's mobile phone shipments have fallen precipitously since 2020 due to problems such as chip supply failure and Google Mobile Service suite outage. The Hongmeng system, which was previously set at the "future Internet of things interface", was also launched in 2020, rapidly expanding from the IOT device end to the mobile end.
There is only one task for Hongmeng system: to ensure that users will not be lost in the case of a large-scale reduction in shipments.
During this period, wangchenglu's team made great progress. In September, 2020, Huawei released the preview version of the harmonyos 2.0 operating system at the developer conference, and three months later released the developer beta version.
On June 2 last year, harmonyos 2 was officially launched, which means that the mobile phone equipped with harmonyos has become a formal product for the market.
From harmonyos 1.0 to the official version of harmonyos 2, wangchenglu's team needs to solve many problems. Different from ordinary mobile phone operating systems, Hongmeng is an IOT oriented operating system. Its primary goal is to use a set of systems to meet various hardware devices.
By the time the official version of harmonyos 2 was released, Hongmeng system already had the basic framework as the mobile phone system and IOT connection center.
For example, hardware mutual assistance and resource sharing based on distributed software bus and distributed device virtualization can be realized among multiple devices through harmonyos 2. While realizing one-time development and multi terminal deployment at the development level of applications and devices, it supports flexible deployment of multiple terminal devices as required, and can adapt to different types of hardware resources and functional requirements.
After the release of harmonyos 2.0, Huawei pushed the official version upgrade to all mobile terminals in a short time. As of December 2021, Huawei has 141 mobile devices supporting Hongmeng system.
"If an old user has a very good experience after upgrading to Hongmeng, he may stay. As long as he grabs it in the past two years, our hardware may come back." What wangchenglu and his team have done is to enable Huawei to build a complete ecosystem before solving the hardware problems. This is the most valuable wealth that wangchenglu has left to Huawei.
After completing the iteration of harmonyos 2, Huawei needs to attract enough developers to participate in the application development for this new system in a short time. It should be noted that when harmonyos 2 was released, there were 24million IOS application developers and 20million Android application developers.
To this end, Huawei first released the harmony OS professional certification at the harmony connect partners summit last July, helping developers achieve professional advancement. Two months later, Huawei released the Euler operating system, which can be widely deployed in servers, cloud computing, edge computing, embedded and other devices. It is compatible with a variety of devices through a set of operating system structure.
These developer oriented service platforms enabled harmonyos 2 to attract more than 1.2 million developers within a few months after its release, helping Hongmeng become the fastest growing operating system in the world.
Previously, Yu Chengdong disclosed that at present, the number of Huawei devices equipped with harmony OS has reached 240million, the number of global monthly live users of Huawei terminals is 730million, the shipment volume of ecological devices is 150million, and there are more than 2000 ecological partners. This has exceeded the target of 300million sets of equipment proposed by wangchenglu last year.
Although the mobile phone business is still constrained, this is the best result for Huawei.
Half full
On April 28 this year, Huawei officially launched the developer preview version of harmonyos 3. At the press conference, Yu Chengdong said that the current Internet of things still has many limitations, such as the prominent data island effect, and the addition of Hongmeng has created a possibility for "intelligent connection and collaboration" between devices.
To achieve this goal, Huawei has launched harmony design system, ark development framework 3.0, ark compiler 3.0, deveco studio 3.0, etc. for development. These development tool Suites enable developers to achieve more efficient end-to-end development of harmoniyos applications and services.
For example, in the past, Huawei provided a multilingual user program framework and capability framework such as java/c/c++/js for the application of harmonyos at the framework layer, as well as a multilingual framework API for various software and hardware services; At the same time, it provides c/c++/js and other multi language framework APIs for devices using harmonyos. The APIs supported by different devices are related to the component tailoring degree of the system.
Now, developers can flexibly select tool Suites according to different devices to complete the assembly of the operating system. Of course, compared with the huge and mature developer teams of IOS and Android, the current million level developers of Hongmeng are still difficult to make up for the disadvantages of applications in a short time.
Although Huawei has shown enough friendliness to developers, it is still difficult to persuade developers to share their energy with Hongmeng due to the strong barriers formed by the operation of IOS and Android for more than ten years.
Huawei's response is to continuously lower the threshold of open source. Wangchenglu once disclosed a point: Huawei analyzed the ecological development history of the PC and mobile industries in the past two decades and found that 16% of the market share is a watershed. If the ecological foundation exceeds 16%, it can succeed without being eliminated by the market.
It may be based on this consideration that Huawei donated all the basic capabilities of harmonyos to the open atom open source foundation twice in 2020 and 2021, and the latter integrated the contributions of other participants to form the openharmony project.
In this regard, wangchenglu once explained that Huawei's move is to enable all companies to equally obtain codes from the open atomic foundation, so that ecological enterprises can better make products according to their own demands. Similarly, Huawei also takes back the code from the open atomic foundation and adds Huawei product features to make products.
However, although Huawei has made Hongmeng fully open source through a third-party organization, this is not enough to support other mobile phone manufacturers to build their own systems through openharmony, because the current openharmony does not have the support of Java programs, and it is naturally impossible to support Android.
For third-party mobile phone manufacturers, it is unrealistic that the mobile phone system does not have the support of Android applications. Although there are dozens of open-source demos on the official website of Huawei developers, most of them are based on common application scenarios and are far from mature open-source systems.
If openharmony fails to gain access from more manufacturers, the "16% watershed" mentioned by wangchenglu will still face considerable challenges before the Huawei chip problem is solved.
Shenkaihong, to which Wang Chenglu joined after his resignation, is a technology enterprise focusing on the secondary development of openharmony. According to the introduction of the company's official website, shenkaihong takes becoming the leader of the intelligent Internet of things operating system as its strategic goal, and focuses on the technology research, development and continuous innovation of the intelligent Internet of things operating system (kaihongos) based on openharmony.
It is worth mentioning that this company is inextricably linked with Huawei. Tianyancha data shows that the largest shareholder of shenkaihong is Hongju innovative information technology partnership (limited partnership), which is personally controlled by chenyuhong, CEO of China soft international. Huawei has always been the largest customer of China soft international. The third largest shareholder is Hubble investment, an investment fund under Huawei.
Therefore, it seems that wangchenglu's resignation is not a simple personnel change, but more like a strong general released by Huawei to seek partners.
Will Hongmeng's ambition be realized
As for Wang Chenglu's departure, an insider told Huxiang: "it will hardly have any substantive impact on Hongmeng project team, and Hongmeng's strategic planning will still be implemented along the existing goals."
According to the insider, from the perspective of Hongmeng ecology, the flow of talents among ecological enterprises has been very frequent in the past two years. Many high-end talents have cooperated with core ecological enterprises to varying degrees. If you try different "combinations", you may be able to create more new sparks.
Having said that, some people still think that wangchenglu's sudden resignation will still have an impact on Hongmeng. Especially in the context of the delay of harmony 3.0, the industry is more worried about the future of Hongmeng, mainly about whether the "de Google" of harmony can proceed smoothly.
In an interview last year, wangchenglu once told the media, "in October this year, the third phase of open source code of Hongmeng will be launched, and there is almost no code contributed by Google from AOSP community."
Wangchenglu's statement pushed Hongmeng to the forefront of the storm for a while, but the "de Google" hornony system still hasn't come out until today. However, it has recently been revealed that Huawei will officially release the beta version of harmony 3.0 at the developer conference held in June.
So, will this version achieve "de googleization"? The answer may not be optimistic.
Zhihu digital big V @blindpirate once analyzed the code of the beta version of hormony 2.0. The statistics show that at least 56% of the AOSP code is submitted by Google, not including non google Com mailbox.
In this regard, an Android Development Engineer also said to Hu Xiang, "it is unlikely to remove the code contributed by Google, because Google has contracted most of the code of the virtual machine and Hal layer in AOSP."
Of course, there is also an interpretation that wangchenglu only refers to the open source part of the code that does not contain Google contributions, not the entire system that does not contain Google contributions. From this point of view, it does make sense.
Another noteworthy issue is Hongmeng's "vehicle and machine plan". The efforts Huawei has made in the vehicle business in the past two years are obvious to all. Wangchenglu also plays a key role in the Bu part of Huawei vehicles. As early as before the launch of Hongmeng system, the conference of Huawei hicar, Huawei's first intelligent vehicle system, was hosted by wangchenglu. After the release of harmony 1.0, wangchenglu also repeatedly said that the vehicle will be a core link in Hongmeng system in the future.
From the actual performance, harmonyos Automotive is fully qualified. This vehicle OS has proved the reliability of Hongmeng vehicle system on the M5. In addition, Huawei has already reached in-depth cooperation with BAIC, Xiaokang, Chang'an, etc. in the future, harmonyos Automotive will be launched on domestic vehicles in succession.
Will wangchenglu's departure have a secondary impact on Huawei's vehicle and machine system? It remains to be seen.
However, one thing is certain. With the continuous iteration of harmonyos and openharmony, the boundary of Hongmeng ecology is also expanding. In terms of the size of Hongmeng, changes in individuals and even teams will hardly have any impact on Hongmeng. What can really affect Hongmeng is Huawei's positioning. Is it a short-term lifesaver? Or the starting point of long-term strategic transformation?
If the latter is the case, Huawei is bound to invest more in the database, compiler, programming language and other basic software in the future. Under this assumption, the impact of Hongmeng is far greater than the system itself.