Before Huawei, China tried (and failed) to make its own OS

Reports claim that Huawei’s Android alternative will be out as soon as fall

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Reports claim that Huawei’s consumer business CEO Richard Yu promised an operating system compatible with Google’s Android as soon as this fall, and no later than spring next year. (Picture: Bloomberg)

Masha Borak

Published: 9:13pm, 22 May 2019Updated: 9:05am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Huawei thinks it has a way out of its ban on using Google’s version of Android: Its homemade operating system may be ready as early as this fall. And if reports are to be believed -- Huawei has yet to officially comment -- it won’t just run on smartphones, but laptops and other devices too.

But building a brand new OS is hard. Getting widespread support for it is even harder. Just ask Microsoft, Samsung… and a whole host of Chinese companies.

Whether down to cost-cutting, boosting self-reliance, or even cybersecurity concerns -- worries that the NSA in the US was spying on the rest of the world, triggered by the Edward Snowden leaks -- Chinese companies have tried to replace a Western OS before. And they’ve failed.

China’s biggest hope for replacing Windows was Red Flag Linux, created in 1999. It was built on open source Linux by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The project shut down in 2014 – apparently, nobody wanted to fund it.

Red Flag Linux did attract some attention but more because of its uncanny resemblance to Windows XP (Picture: Red Flag Linux)

This was how one government engineer described their experience with Red Flag Linux:

"Using the system was like riding a bicycle on [a major Beijing road]. It was politically correct, even cool sometimes, but quite exhausting -- and always lonely."