Faced with US sanctions, Huawei announced on Tuesday the imminent deployment of its own operating system, Harmony OS, on all of its smartphones.
At the heart of the Sino-American rivalry, the Chinese telecoms juggernaut, suspected by the former Trump administration of espionage, was blacklisted in 2019 by Washington, which prevents it from accessing American technologies for its products.
They no longer have access to Google services, which makes the Android operating system almost unusable.
A system developed in open source, which was used in the development of Harmony OS.
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In a short video on social media, the Shenzhen-based group announced that HarmonyOS, first shown in 2019, will be available on all of its phones globally as of June 2, without giving further details.
HarmonyOS had initially been gradually deployed on Huawei's connected devices, in particular its televisions.
Integrating the system with all of the brand's phones is a crucial step.
Observers, however, remain skeptical of Huawei's ability to compete with systems from Apple (iOS) and Google (Android), which already power the vast majority of phones around the world.
"Little hold" on the part of the USA
In an internal note to his employees consulted Tuesday by AFP, the founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, calls on his employees for an all-out transformation of his group and to accelerate autonomy in software.
Thus, "the United States will have very little control over our future development," writes the 76-year-old businessman, in a document which repeats statements already made in the past.
Analysts believe that the rise of 5G, the latest mobile standard to accelerate the digitization of the global economy, should offer the group new opportunities in the coming years.
"It is therefore normal to go in this direction," said analyst Marc Einstein, for the research firm IRT, based in Tokyo.
By investing in the "cloud" and software, the telecoms giant will however find itself in competition with other Chinese tech players such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, who are also investing heavily there, warns Mr. Einstein.
Huawei was once one of the world's largest smartphone vendors, along with South Korea's Samsung and Apple.
But US sanctions kicked the Chinese company off the podium.