The largest Russian smartphone manufacturer BQ has suffered a major blow in the current heat of economic war between Asia and the western countries. The comes as a result of emerging new U.S laws that prohibit exporting any technology of U.S origin to Russia.
BQ’s general manager Mr. Vladimir Buzanov told the media that the company had received a notice from Google stating that they will no longer certify BQ smartphones to run on Android operating system.
This ban will not affect BQ’s existing models but new devices will be released without support of Google services.
However, if the sanctions escalate further, existing models may be disconnected from in-app purchases and subscriptions on Google Playstore. There is a possibility of banning Russia from importing Android devices as well.
Mr. Buzanov also hinted that they are already testing Huawei’s operating system and they will release BQ devices with HarmonyOS in the second half of 2022.
The HarmonyOS
In August 2019, Chinese tech giant Huawei released HarmonyOS. This is a distributed operating system developed to run on multiple devices. Blacklisting of Huawei by the former U.S president John Trump accelerated the birth of HarmonyOS.
It significantly reduced the dependence on U.S technology like Google & Apple. They tested it on their flagship Mate 40 and foldable Mate X2 smartphones, the Watch Series 3 smartwatch and MatePad Pro tablet.
Later in 2020, Huawei released HarmonyOS v2.0 with three major distributions: distributed soft bus, distributed data management, and distributed security. This allowed users to freely combine hardware and integrate multiple terminals.
To facilitate multi-device connections, HarmonyOS comes with a unified control center, which adopts a card-type design, with a seamless interface.
As at December last year, Huawei revealed that over 220M Huawei devices run harmonyOS.
