Huawei claims its operating system can challenge Google, Apple

"Huawei is in a position to deliver an ecosystem that is on par with Google's and Apple's ecosystems," said Eric Tan, Huawei's head of consumer cloud services.

"We have the confidence to be one of the top ecosystem developers in the world," he said while speaking about Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and its related app store during ‘Global Analyst Summit' in Shenzhen on Wednesday.

Huawei's App Gallery reached 420 million users in the first quarter of this year. According to the company, App Gallery is now available in more than 170 countries.

"We must join up with our partners – developers – to provide the apps that consumers demand," Tan said.

According to Huawei, there are now 1.4 million developers registered to create apps for App Gallery.

Over the last decade, the smartphone operating system (OS) business has become a duopoly. Either you have Apples iPhones running on iOS or a device powered by Google's Android.

In the wake of the US-China trade war, the Chinese giant last August officially launched ‘HarmonyOS' aimed to reduce the company's reliance on Google-developed Android OS.

In December last year, Huawei said it is preparing to bring Harmony OS to smartphones.

Being a local Chinese company/brand, it would be easier for Huawei/HarmonyOS to build a well-rounded mobile ecosystem given its familiarity of the digital ecosystem there and the large scale of Huawei's mobile phone penetration.

Ever since Google suspended the Huawei's Android license, following the US government's decision to put Huawei on the Entity List, there had been a lot of speculation about Huawei's in-house OS.