Huawei is hoping that its new operating system, HarmonyOS, will be ready to work on smartphones within the next six to nine months, according to press statements by Vincent Bang, senior vice president and president of Western Europe at Huawei.
"We can't wait any longer. One of our flagship phones has been damaged," Pang said, referring to the recently launched Matt 30 smartphone running on an open-source version of Android, but it doesn't include any Google services or apps, including In that Google Play store.
The US Commerce Department has placed Huawei, the world's second-largest smartphone vendor by market share, on a commercial blacklist that prevents it from doing business with US companies unless they get government permission.
This means that Huawei is unable to work with Google, which owns the Android platform that runs the majority of smartphones around the world, losing the Chinese company the ability to use Android from Google on its phones exported to markets outside China.
Huawei is configuring its Harmony OS, which the company unveiled in August, and plans to make it more than just a smartphone operating system to replace the Android system.
The company described its operating system as a platform that runs many devices, including smart watches, IoT devices, televisions, and more.
"Harmony is not a replacement for the Android system, it is the next generation of Android," Pang said. So far, the company has unveiled televisions that operate the system.
However, the company did not release accurate information on when and how to launch the operating system on smartphones, saying only that it hopes to be able to work with Google in the future.
The company's consumer business chief Richard Yu said in May that the operating system for smartphones and laptops might be ready for markets outside China in the first or second quarter of 2020.