HTC Building A New OS With The Chinese Government
An alliance with the Chinese government should help HTC gain some traction in China
When politics and tech development merge, we have interesting developments — the cold war is a testament to this. It was during this phase that “putting the man on the moon” developments by NASA and developments in the defense sectors took place which later translated into civilian technology — camera capability, night vision, GPS, Kevlar protection, nuclear power, wireless technology and many more.
The political scenario is ripe again with economies falling, new powers emerging and secrets being revealed — to fuel a nation’s thirst for technology to aid their security and progress giving them the added advantage over other nations.
China has been reluctant to let US based technology into China and has been heavily policing or blocking them. The websites most of us use in our everyday life are not accessible to the Chinese public; the list is long and includes Google Drive, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa, Wordpress, Vimeo, Dropbox and many more.
The Chinese government have been exploring home grown technologies that abide by the Chinese guidelines, thus reducing their perceived threat against technological independence.
WSJ were the first to report that HTC might have joined hands with the Chinese government to develop an operating system (OS) specifically for the Chinese users to effectively gain a deeper penetration into the fertile Chinese markets.
Working with the Chinese Government will ensure that they have an upper hand at regulatory compliances and will be better integrated with apps aimed at the Chinese markets. Maybe this is the turning point in their dwindling market share.
HTC Chairwoman, Cher Wang, has personally been at the helm developing the smartphone maker’s operating system and HTC aims at releasing it by year-end.
HTC has been bitten by Google and Microsoft before and may not want to depend on them for the OS on their devices alone (HTC remains a member of the “Open Handset Alliance” led by Google for Android). Are they unhitching their wagon and going the Apple way: develop your own Operating System. Developing a new “OS” is not all that difficult; you have Linux based OSes to work with like in the cases of Tizen (Samsung and Intel) and Sailfish (Nokia and Jolla). HTC can also explore Android, however it could be a thorny relationship as Google may restrict them.
An alliance with the Chinese government should help HTC gain some traction in China while it regroups to address their loss in the Global Markets. Should the Android and iOS team be worried? The trade pundits have not yet raised any alarms, but the long-term changes may not be in sight just yet.
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
