Huawei says Hongmeng operating system not for smartphones, intends to continue with Android

BRUSSELS -- Huawei board member and senior Vice President Catherine Chen said here on Thursday that the company's Hongmeng operating system is not for smartphones and the company intends to continue to use Google's Android operating system for its smartphones.

The Hongmeng system has previously been widely reported in the media as a potential alternative to Android on smartphones, but Chen, when asked at a media roundtable in Brussels, was unequivocal that it is not designed for that.

She said the recently-trademarked Hongmeng is for industrial use and actually has been in development long before the current discussions around finding an alternative to Android.

Chen said while an operating system for smartphones usually contain dozens of millions of lines of codes, Hongmeng contains much fewer - in the quantity of hundreds of thousands - and therefore very secure. The Hongmeng system also has extreme low latency compared with a smartphone operating system, she added.

Huawei, a worldwide leading vendor of equipments to telecommunications operators such as Vodafone, has also become in recent years an international powerhouse of consumer devices such as smartphones which run on the Android system. The China-headquartered company intends to continue using Android, she added.