But you're typing this on an iPhone, people say, when you say shit about the USA. Well, not today Great Satan, not today. Actually, still today (I'm on a MacBook), but I'm on the way. I just (about) switched my phone to Huawei.

Background

When Trump first attacked Huawei, he thought he'd be throwing China back to the abacus days. But that's not what happened. Huawei diligently began developing their own tech from the chipset/kernel/OS up and it's culminated in HarmonyOS devices. This is the mythical third OS, which finally works.

HarmonyOS devices are probably the best in the world, though they're not yet released to the world. The Huawei Mate XT is the world's only tri-folding phone and, if you're into that sort of thing, the best phone in the world. The Huawei MateBook Fold is a folding laptop (all screen, until you feel like typing), and so far ahead of the competition it's absurd. It's a brave new world, albeit China only.

Within China, HarmonyOS now has more smartphone users than iOS (17% vs. 16%) and as Trump slaps exports controls on all US software, will begin eating into Android also. One laptop release alone (the MateBook Fold) has taken over the high-end category ($2,800+), giving them 73% market share of the baller market. But again, this is just in China, by design. Huawei are testing and besting this technology in China before global roll-out. But I simply couldn't wait any longer. So I bought one of the Chinese devices.

Foreground

You can just buy a Chinese-market phones, though they're not really supported. So I bought the cheapest one available on Wondamobile to try it out. Buying the device is easy enough, but setting it up is taking me a week and stuff doesn't ‘just work’ because it's not supported. If you set it up with your real location (Sri Lanka) in my case, it's not bad, but if you change the location to China (to get the latest HarmonyOS updates) it gets weird.

HarmonyOS is not Android—it's original from the kernel up—but you can still run Android apps. Apps that offer direct APK downloads (why don't more people do this?) run like native (to my non-native eye). So stuff like Signal and Telegram just work (though Telegram today has its own problems, SMS Fee and so on). You can get Android apps without Play Store access using EasyAbroad (for Chinese users only) or from GBox (for both, at least for me). But it's all very trial and errory. I had to try multiple times in many ways to get my email app working (Hey) and I'm never sure if my janky solutions will survive updates.

The irony is that my foreign apps work fine (Spotify, banking apps, local delivery/cabs) but my Chinese apps don't work. Because I'm on the Chinese side of the Silicon Curtain, I can't use my foreign WeChat or RedNote accounts anymore, and am finding this impossible to work around. Thus I may need to keep my iPhone to use Chinese apps, which is ironic.

Common Ground

I still have honestly a week's worth of settings to tweak and apps to sneak and I'll probably brick my setup a few times in the interim, but it's very interesting. I have learned the Chinese characters for settings at least (设置). At the same time, I wouldn't recommend this for anybody outside of China really, unless you enjoy hacking 设置 (which I do).

My personal motivation is that operating systems are occupation systems. I've been trying to decolonize my digital for years but as long as you use iPhone or Android, the thing is corrupted down to the kernel. Western devices will simply blow up if you don't like 'Israel' enough, and they're also just stagnant and boring. America is just cutting of China from their old technology while cutting themselves off from the new Chinese stuff, which is much better.

As China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in 2020, “Any attempt to decouple from China is to decouple from the world's future largest market, to decouple from its own major development opportunities, and to decouple from the unstoppable trend of the times.” The Western tech ecosystem is rapidly getting cut off from the best tech in the world (to spite their own racist faces) while China is opening up. This is the unstoppable trend of the times, and HarmonyOS will be refined and released globally soon enough (at which point I'll change my region and brick my whole setup once more). The trend line of the times leads to a third operating system, for the third world. You heard it here first.