Because of these consumer demographics of how they use their apps and what kind of apps they prefer, I don't think it's inconceivable that they can get a big initial customer base in China. In a country of a billion-plus people who also wouldn't mind supporting a home team company, that would be enough to keep HarmonyOS sustainably alive.
Need a thriving app ecosystem? You think they can't convince a number of Chinese app developers to develop for HarmonyOS? Especially the big app developers if the government asks for it?
Yes, there are questions whether HarmonyOS can become an internationally prevalent OS. But that's just a larger definition of success. I would not be surprised to see HarmonyOS become huge in China by itself, at least on par with iOS in terms of Chinese market share, if not better. And if that happens, I cannot see how I would consider HarmonyOS not a success.
I think that's part of what they're talking about when they say these others never crossed the chasm.
And, yes, KaiOS has crossed the chasm, but I don't see:
- that being open source helped with carrier deals and hence adoption, or
- that they've solved the app ecosystem issue
https://www.androidcentral.com/apparently-nokia-feature-phon...
Actually FirefoxOS pretty much has "crossed the chasm". It's just that that happened after Mozilla abandoned it and KaiOS took it over. They've shipped 100M units. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/22/kaios-raises-50m-more-hits... Weird that a mobile-focused developer site would miss this.
It's true that Huawei open-sourcing HarmonyOS is no guarantee of success, but that's a bit obvious.