Huawei’s New OS Could Be Called ‘Ark’ Instead of ‘HongMeng’; Rumours of a June 2019 Launch is Untrue

Imagine it’s 2022 now. Yishun has become a country of its own, PMDs are banned and people aren’t anyhowly throwing rubber bands.

And when a new app is developed, you’d see that it’s available in “Android, iOS and Ark.”

Wait, Ark?

Is that a new BlackBerry or Nokia OS, given that the name sounds so…ang mo?

Apparently not.

Ark could be the name of Huawei’s new OS.

Huawei Suddenly Trademarked a Few Names in Europe

Given that a bulk of Huawei’s overseas market is in Europe, it makes sense that if they’re going to trademark a name for their new OS, it’d be done in Europe.

Last Friday (24 May 2019), the company filed trademarks for these names with the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office): HUAWEI ARK OS, HUAWEI ARK, ARK, and ARK OS.

Huawei didn’t make any official announcement about this, but even a two-year-old kid would be able to see the correlation.

And if so, that means HongMeng, which sounds like everyone’s primary school friend’s name, is merely a working name, and that makes sense.

We might be able to pronounce Huawei without any difficulty, but it seems like the ang mos can’t get it right:

In fact, back in Huawei’s early days, the company did think of changing to an English name, but did not go through with their plans; instead, they launched a name recognition campaign to encourage the pronunciation of “Wow Way”, which is why you hear some ang mos using this pronunciation.

Launch of OS in June 2019 an “Internal Confusion”

Have you heard the news about HongMeng (or Ark) launching in June 2019, which is like one week from now?

If so, then it could have been from Alaa Elshimy, Managing Director and Vice President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group Middle East. He told TechRadar this: “Huawei knew this was coming and was preparing. The OS was ready in January 2018 and this was our ‘Plan B’. We did not want to bring the OS to the market as we had a strong relationship with Google and others and did not want to ruin the relationship. Now, we are rolling it out next month.”

Needless to say, that got everyone excited…until representatives from Huawei’s consumer group called the same media outlet again, saying that the previous statement was made due to some “confusion internally”, and that it will still be out in late 2019 for the China market and 2020 for everyone else.

Lest you’re not one who comes to our app daily (WHY!?), here are some hearsay about the new OS: it’s rumoured to be 60% faster than Android, can be used for all devices including laptops and cars, and is most probably using AppGallery (their internal app store) and Aptoide, a third-party open-source app store that runs Android apps, too.

Interesting times ahead, no?