Huawei Technologies has already been working seven years on the development of its own operating system (OS) for mobile phones, the South China Morning Post reports. The effort has become urgent in the past few months, as Huawei has been put on a U.S. blacklist, prohibiting U.S. companies and foreign companies with U.S. technology in their products from providing hardware and software solutions to Huawei without special U.S. government approval. The company is therefore deprived of future versions of the Android mobile operating system.

Seven years ago, a small group of top Huawei 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 U.S. ban in the future. The group agreed that Huawei should build a proprietary OS as a potential alternative to Android. This meeting was later called the “lakeside talks” internally and access to documents relating to the gathering became highly restricted last year, sources said.

A specialist OS team led by executives including Eric Xu, currently one of the three rotating Chairmen of Huawei, was established and began to work on an OS under conditions of tight secrecy. A specialized zone was created on the Huawei campus to house the OS team, with guards at the door. Only employees on the OS team had access to the specialist area, where personal mobile phones were not allowed. The OS project became an important part of Huawei 2012 Laboratories, which functions as the innovation, research and technology development arm of the company.

When the OS project started, Huawei had less than a 5% share of the global market. Now it is the world’s second-biggest smartphone supplier and shipped a total of 206 million smartphones in 2018. Huawei is now facing U.S. charges that it stole trade secrets, violated economic sanctions and concealed its Iran business dealings via an unofficial subsidiary, charges which Huawei has repeatedly denied. Google and Microsoft, whose Android and Windows software Huawei largely relies upon in its smartphones, tablets and laptops, have both suspended access for new Huawei devices. With only a 90-day reprieve from the U.S. government until supplies are completely blocked, the Chinese company has finally had to acknowledge its long-secret plans for an alternative OS.

One of the biggest technical challenges for the Huawei OS – codenamed Hongmeng in Chinese and Ark in English – has been its compatibility with Android. Compatibility would enable a Huawei phone with its own OS to download and run Android apps seamlessly, while app developers around the world would not need to develop extra code for Huawei’s OS. Past attempts by other companies – including Microsoft and Samsung – to create an Android alternative have not been successful. Huawei faces a challenging task: Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS account for 99.9% of the global market for mobile phone operating systems, the South China Morning Post reports.

Huawei, is gearing up to ship almost 225 million devices already running HongMeng or Ark OS by October 2019. A recent report from Rosenblatt Securities revealed that Huawei has already shipped around 1 million devices pre-loaded with the HongMeng OS. It will be compatible with all Android apps and pre-loaded devices will have increased security functionalities to maximize protection of users’ personal data. One source claimed that the Ark OS performed 60% faster than Google’s Android.

Huawei is also considering to use a Russian OS. Russian Telecom and Mass Communications Minister Konstantin Noskov and Huawei’s rotating Chairman Guo Ping discussed the Chinese firm’s switching to Aurora, the Russian version of the Finnish OS Sailfish, and Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, also touched on the issue during their talks. Sailfish OS was developed in 2012 by the Finnish company Jolla, founded by former Nokia staffers. In 2014, Russian billionaire Grigory Berezkin purchased a share in it after he agreed with the Russian government to develop a Russian mobile Sailfish-based OS. Sailfish is based on Nokia’s and Intel’s aborted MeeGo OS and uses only Android’s hardware layer. If it is installed on Huawei devices, they will not be able to access many Android apps because Sailfish’s compatibility layer is far from perfect. As the U.S. turns the screws on Huawei, launching its own OS has now taken on critical importance. Additionally, China and Russia are negotiating the creation of joint chip manufacturing and software development, according to RT.

Huawei, which has been accused of infringing on U.S. patenst, has now turned the IP case around against the U.S. Huawei holds 56,492 active patents on telecom, networking and other hi-tech inventions worldwide, according to Anaqua’s AcclaimIP, and it is stepping up pursuit of royalties and licensing fees as its access to American markets and suppliers is being restricted. The company is in protracted licensing talks with phone-services provider Verizon Communications and is in a dispute with chip maker Qualcomm over the value of patents. “Given Huawei’s position and the pressure they are feeling, they have nothing to lose at this point than to go after American companies in the patent arena,” said Peter Toren, a Washington-based patent lawyer. “They get poked in one area and they’re going to stick back in another to show there are consequences for this continued pressure. I don’t see how the government can stop them. They have ownership in the patents,” Toren added.

Huawei’s American chip suppliers, including Qualcomm and Intel, are quietly pressing the U.S. government to ease its ban on sales to Huawei, even as the company itself avoids government lobbying. Executives from top U.S. chip makers Intel and Xilinx attended a meeting in late May with the U.S. Commerce Department to discuss a response to Huawei’s placement on the blacklist. The ban bars U.S. suppliers from selling to Huawei without special approval. U.S. chip makers argue that Huawei units selling products such as smartphones and computer servers use commonly available parts and are unlikely to present the same security concerns as the company’s 5G networking gear. “This isn’t about helping Huawei. It’s about preventing harm to American companies,” one source said. Out of USD70 billion that Huawei spent buying components in 2018, some USD11 billion went to U.S. firms including Qualcomm, Intel and Micron Technology, the South China Morning Post reports.