The Trump administration wants to put the brakes on Huawei. It would be a dramatic turn, if, with this, they would accelerate the development process for a global operating system by the tech company from China.

The Trump administration wants to put the brakes on the Chinese tech company Huawei. It warns allied countries against using its components to set up the important 5G cellular network technology standard. And it severely restricts American companies from supplying Huawei with hardware and software. This is a big blow for Huawei. Because the company uses the Android operating system from Google, which is installed on the vast majority of cell phones worldwide, including the functionality that comes along with it. Because they know this digital ecosystem, many people, even outside of China, have opted for Huawei cell phones so far.

The American sanctions endanger this success in the short term. At the same time, they increase the pressure on Huawei to develop alternatives. Executive Director Richard Yu has finally presented the HarmonyOS operating system. How powerful it is, how well users can cope with it, will still have to be seen. It will probably not be able to compete internationally with the Android environment for a long time. Meanwhile, the Chinese have made their claim clear: "We want to build a global operating system, so it will not be used by Huawei alone." It would be a dramatic turn, if, in retrospect, the American sanctions in particular were to have accelerated this development process.