The establishment of the third largest ecosystem: Why does Huawei attract developers to join the HMS ecosystem?

At the Huawei Developer Conference 2020 last week, we saw Huawei’s determination to build the “third largest mobile application ecosystem”. We even believe that if the pattern of international trade had not undergone great changes, Huawei would probably build a “full-scene” ecosystem much faster than it is now.

What are the specific improvements in Hongmeng 2.0 last week? In the article “Huawei mobile phones can be used next year”, we roughly expounded some of Huawei’s own technical characteristics in the ecological layout, as well as the “full scene” and “distributed” concepts of the HarmonyOS operating system for mobile phones and various IoT devices in the future. .

On the road to truly implement Huawei’s technologies, developers are the key to Huawei’s ability to implement and spread the technology on a global scale. Therefore, in the keynote speech of the Huawei Developer Conference, several speakers, including Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, mentioned that ecological construction is far more difficult than technology itself. After all, it is a challenge to the two mature mobile ecosystems. Many previous challengers have already been defeated. Why does Huawei have room for survival in the market, or even succeed?

No matter how many concepts of “openness” and “empowerment” Huawei expressed at the meeting, its essence is to attract developers into its own ecosystem. This is actually an important propaganda point for many new ecosystems in the early stage. For example, the BlackBerry 10 in the early years, before the system was officially launched, was already accumulating resources that could be put on the app store, and held a large number of developer activities to give developers sufficient subsidies and rewards. But it’s clear that BlackBerry didn’t succeed, no matter how big the early battles were.

So where is Huawei’s confidence? Although it may not be easy to answer this question, we can see part of the basis at the Huawei Developer Conference.

The technical value of HMS Core itself

In the last article about HarmonyOS 2.0, we briefly introduced the concepts and capabilities of HMS (Huawei Mobile Services). In our opinion, HMS is actually very much like one that Huawei has been planning for a long time. It partially decouples Android from upper-layer applications, and even produces an important solution for development stickiness.

The Android system in a broad sense includes two parts: AOSP + GMS. In principle, AOSP is open source, while GMS (Google Mobile Service) is not open source. It belongs to Google’s strategic composition of controlling the Android ecosystem. From the perspective of consumer users, the Google framework, including Google Maps, Play Store, and advertising services, are all part of it. This is actually very similar to the HarmonyOS+HMS mode.

Although there are differences in capabilities, HMS does exist to replace GMS. From the perspective of Huawei’s planning, HMS Core can not only be applied to the current Android system, but also can be built on the HarmonyOS that is about to be rolled out on a large scale. Therefore, Huawei’s existing developer resources, including developers who joined the HMS Overseas Ecological Alliance, will transition to HarmonyOS in the future, and the process should be relatively seamless, including Huawei’s unique “distributed technology” capabilities. (Although I don’t know if DevEco can develop at one time, it will package solutions for two systems at the same time)

From the most intuitive point of view, HMS also has some basic capabilities like GMS, including the “payment engine”, “advertising engine”, “browsing engine”, “map engine” and “search engine” that we mentioned in previous articles. The construction of these capabilities is actually not easy, and many of these projects are the traditional strengths of Google, which are difficult for Apple to match.

Although we don’t know the specific level of Huawei’s current capabilities in these areas, according to Zhang Ping’an, president of Huawei’s consumer business cloud service, Huawei is quite confident in these areas. Taking the “map engine” as an example, Zhang Ping’an mentioned in his keynote speech that the map engine “opened 11 capabilities” (route planning, drag-and-drop 3D scene layout, full-scene spatial computing capabilities, location search, geofencing, etc.) , Location Kit can meet the positioning accuracy requirements in different scenarios, which has been refined to sub-meter-level positioning of indoor navigation, and even centimeter-level positioning – positioning technologies include Beidou satellite navigation, RTK high-precision sub-meter positioning technology, FTM high-precision positioning technology Accurate indoor positioning technology and so on.

Considering “how to make indoor navigation different”, it is obviously not simple in terms of ability. I don’t know if it has joined some traditional strong partners in this field in the geographical location service. The data provided by Zhang Ping’an is that “2000+ overseas applications have integrated HMS Map Kit”, indicating that its maturity is relatively high.

Another example is the search engine, which has reached “170+ overseas countries/regions” and covered “50+ languages” by taking the “Mobile First” mobile search scenario as the first consideration. “For example, e-commerce applications, embedded in Huawei’s search engine – we provide customized search engines, and are willing to fully open to partners.”

The above are two examples of “HMS Five Root Service Engines”. In addition to the “HMS Five Root Service Engines”, in the previous article, we also highlighted the graphics technology-related Kits updated by HMS Core 5.0, including Computer Graphics Kit and Scene Kit, which is a lightweight rendering engine service for 3D applications. , from the data point of view, it also includes PBR pipelines, particle effects, etc.; and AI-related machine learning ML Kit (and the open source MindSpore Lite framework for end-side inferencing); and Huawei’s imaging technology capabilities Camera Kit, etc. These are empowered to developers through the HMS ecosystem, which includes a large number of API components.

Check out the initial report card

This model looks quite ideal, and judging from a lot of data released at the Huawei Developer Conference, the early effects are also ideal. For example, “The co-branding of Chinese game company Lilith and Huawei is a good example. Two of Lilith’s games, Rise of Kingdoms and AFK Arena, have new downloads per month. Over 140%.”

At the same time, HMS Core provides 56 Kits and 12,981 APIs this year – the two figures were 14 and 885 last year. Globally registered developers increased from 910,000 in 2019 to 1.8 million in 2020; applications integrating HMS Core increased from 43,000 in 2019 to 96,000 this year; the number of “overseas boutique applications” on the shelves increased within one year 10 times, and now there are 73,000 – these are data released by Huawei itself.

“HMS Apps serve users in 170+ countries and regions around the world”. These achievements naturally promote the continuous improvement of the HMS ecosystem itself. That’s why Yu Chengdong said, “With the support of 1.8 million developers, the world’s third-largest mobile application ecosystem has broken ground.”

Of course, these are not only the technical capabilities of HMS Core itself, but also the achievements of the HMS Overseas Ecological Alliance – more support plans for developers, as well as improving its own technology and market attractiveness are also very important. Here we just use the HMS Ecological Alliance to get a glimpse of the leopard.

And we believe that the most critical factor for Huawei’s own advantages is the sales of all-scenario business products including Huawei’s “HMS mobile phone”, which is the fundamental reason why Huawei has the confidence to say that it will be the “third largest mobile ecosystem”. The specific results are shown in the figure above. Wang Yanmin, President of Huawei’s Consumer Business Global Ecosystem Development Department, said: “As we all know, in July and August, we announced that Huawei (mobile phone) achieved the first global market share for the first time, and a large part of the entire market share actually came from Europe. “

“Our GMS mobile phone sales have maintained a very good momentum. At the same time, HMS mobile phones have also achieved very good results in Europe. We achieved the HMS mobile phone sales target nearly a month ahead of schedule.” “We set the goal last year, as a brand new ecosystem, Our first step is to select the top 3,000 apps as the first batch of ecological development goals, including social, news, sports and health, etc. As of last month, nearly 80% of the top apps have cooperated with us. “

Zhang Zhe said: “Huawei has three BGs for so many years, network, terminal and enterprise business. These three areas have technical accumulation and capabilities. We have made achievements in the most cutting-edge areas: 5G, intelligent computing, and cloud capabilities. Now there is a lack of ecology. When the ecology is completed, the entire capability will be relatively complete. From a global perspective, we are one of the few companies that can become the third ecology and have one third of the world. We are now capable do this.”