Seven years ago, in a villa facing a lake in Shenzhen, a small group of top Huawei Technologies executives headed by founder Ren Zhengfei held a closed-door meeting that lasted for several days. Their mission was to brainstorm ideas on how Huawei should respond to the rising success of Google’s Android smartphone operating system (OS) around the world – software that it used on its own handsets. The underlying concern was that dependence on Android could render the company vulnerable to a US ban in the future.
The group agreed that Huawei should build a proprietary OS as a potential alternative to Android, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the information is private.
