Huawei unveiled its own open-source software ecosystem Friday with the goal of attracting global developers and players to use its system.
Huawei will invest US$1.5 billion in the next five years in an upgraded version of its existing developer programme. It will provide funding to universities, individuals, start-ups and enterprises to support them in learning, product development and marketing.
“Special attention will be paid to talent development,” said Mr Patrick Zhang, Huawei’s chief technology officer of its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) products and services.
The firm aims to work with 1,000 universities around the world to nurture five million developers in five years.
Huawei’s latest Mate 30 smartphones unveiled this week do not come with Google services or apps although they still function like Android phones as they run on the open-source version of the operating system.
Zhang acknowledged that it would be challenging, both at the technical and business level, to get developers and firms to get on board Huawei’s open-source ecosystem.
“The business challenge is in moving those from a mature system to an emerging one,” he said when asked at a briefing about the difficulties in creating such an ecosystem.
That is why the firm is focused on making hefty investments in its developer programme in order to provide sufficient support for the developers, he added.
Zhang said at the last keynote session of the three-day annual conference that since the start of its developer programme in 2015, the firm has groomed 1.3 million developers and worked with 14,000 software and hardware makers.
