From Early Experiments to HarmonyOS: The Rise and Fall of Chinese Mobile Operating Systems

Chinese mobile operating system development began in the early 2000s when Beijing KeTai Century Technology Co., Ltd. (later Shanghai KeTai Century) launched the "HeXin" OS for TD‑SCDMA phones, backed by former Microsoft researcher Chen Rong.

In the mid‑2000s, the Hopen OS project, led by the Chinese Academy of Software Engineering and commercialized by Beijing KaSi HaoPeng Software Engineering Technology Co., produced the first domestic mobile OS for PDAs and early smartphones, but suffered from limited extensibility and market impact.

2008 marked the launch of carrier‑specific systems: China Mobile's OMS (Open Mobile System) and China Unicom's TIOS, both based on Android source code with minor customizations, which failed to gain user acceptance due to poor performance and lack of app compatibility.

During the same period, many manufacturers released Android‑based custom ROMs (MIUI, Flyme, EMUI, ColorOS, etc.) and smaller projects such as YunOS, Baidu Cloud OS, and Tencent TOS, which struggled with ecosystem support and eventually faded.

After 2019, major vendors shifted toward deep integration and self‑development: Huawei introduced HarmonyOS (formerly Hongmeng), Xiaomi’s Pengpai, OPPO’s Marianas, and Vivo’s V series, aiming to reduce reliance on Google services after U.S. sanctions.

HarmonyOS evolved from an Android‑compatible layer to a fully independent stack, culminating in the 2024 release of HarmonyOS NEXT, touted as China’s first fully self‑researched mobile OS with a growing ecosystem across phones, wearables, IoT, and even PCs.

Overall, the Chinese mobile OS landscape has moved from fragmented, short‑lived experiments to a more consolidated focus on proprietary platforms, though achieving global ecosystem parity remains a challenge.