(Yicai) Dec. 8 – China's largest third-party payment platform Alipay has become the latest internet giant to team up with Huawei Technologies to start developing a mobile application that is native to the Chinese tech giant’s Harmony operating system as Huawei moves to introduce an independent HarmonyOS ecosystem.

Hangzhou-based Alipay and Huawei held a kickoff ceremony for the development of a HarmonyOS native app in Hangzhou yesterday. It follows the announcement by Huawei Executive Director Yu Chengdong on Sept. 25 that the company is rolling out apps specific to its OS architecture.

This could mean that the next generation of HarmonyOS will no longer be compatible with Android OS, which supports most of the apps on Huawei phones, industry insiders said.

Nearly half of the country’s top 20 mobile apps, including Meituan, Bilibili and Amap, have since become partners of HarmonyOS, Shenzhen-based Huawei said recently.

HarmonyOS has developed rapidly since its launch in 2019. There were more than 700 million terminal devices, including mobile phones, tablets and IoT products, installed with the software as of August, and more than 2.2 million developers, the Shenzhen-based company said.

But HarmonyOS still only accounted for 11.8 percent of China’s smartphone OS market in the first three quarters, compared with 71.8 percent for Android’s OS and 16.4 percent for Apple’s iOS, according to market research firm IDC.

Editor: Kim Taylor