The Bell Edition information from several unnamed sources about the discussion of the possibility of using the proprietary Aurora mobile operating system on some types of Huawei devices, under which, based on a license received from Jolla, Rostelecom supplies a localized version of the Sailfish OS under its brand.
The movement towards Aurora has so far been limited only to discussing the possibility of using this OS, no plans have been presented. The discussion was attended by the Minister of Digital Development and Communications Konstantin Noskov and the Executive Director of Huawei. The meeting also raised the issue of establishing a joint production of chips and software in Russia. The information was not confirmed by Rostelecom, but they expressed their willingness to cooperate.
Huawei declined to comment on the published information. At the same time, the company own mobile platform (Arc OS) for compatibility with Android applications. The first release of Hongmeng OS is scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year.
Two options will be offered - for China and the global smartphone market. It is claimed that
Hongmeng OS has been in development since 2012 and was ready by early 2018, but didn't ship due to being used as the main Android platform and partnering with Google.
There is evidence that the first batch of 1 million smartphones based on Hongmeng OS has already been distributed for testing in China. Technical details have not yet been disclosed and it is not clear whether the platform is built on Android code or just includes a layer for compatibility.
Huawei has been shipping its own edition of Android for a long time - , it is possible that it is the basis of Hongmeng OS.
Huawei's interest in alternative mobile systems is due to restrictive measures introduced by the US Department of Commerce, which restricting Huawei's access to Android services subject to a commercial agreement with Google; and terminating its commercial relationship with ARM. At the same time, the introduced measures to restrict exports do not apply to open source software developed by companies and non-profit organizations registered in the United States. Huawei will be able to continue to build Android firmware based on the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) open source code base and release updates based on the published open source code, but will not be able to pre-install the proprietary Google Apps suite.
Recall that Sailfish is a partially proprietary mobile operating system with an open system environment, but a closed user shell, basic mobile applications, QML components for building a Silica graphical interface, a layer for running Android applications, a smart text input engine and a data synchronization system. The open system environment is built on the basis of (MeeGo fork), which since April as part of Sailfish, and packages from the Nemo Mer distribution. On top of the Mer system components, a graphics stack based on Wayland and the Qt5 library is launched.
Source: opennet.ru