Huawei Exceeds 200 Million Smartphone Shipments, Setting Company Record (engadget.com)

Huawei's 2018 was tumultuous, to put it mildly, but the company has at least a few reasons to brag. The Chinese mobile giant has revealed that it shipped over 200 million smartphones in the year, setting a new record. Last year, Huawei moved 153 million smartphones units. From a report: The Chinese phone maker said the numbers were largely driven by the success of products like its P20, Honor 10 and Mate 20 series. Huawei's smartphone shipments have grown from 3 million units in 2010, it added. Last year, it said it sold 153 million units. The company overtook Apple in the second quarter of 2018 to become the world's second largest phone vendor, according to researcher Canalys. "In the global smartphone market, Huawei has gone from being dismissed as a statistical 'other' to ranking among the Top 3 players in the world," Huawei said in its statement.

Comments

Re:It will surge

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Lived in China for over 10 years. Yes, there are nationalists here who will always buy Huawei or Xiaomi because it's Chinese. But the majority here don't give a shit about that. They buy Apple because it's an expensive status symbol, or buy anything else because they just want a phone. Most people here don't give a shit about Chinese news, because they know it's Chinese. Yeah, they don't do anything about it, but it doesn't mean they like it. You seem to be the typical clueless laowai: can't see the forest through the trees.

Secure? How?

[DrYak]

Plus that âoefruitâ has a different OS and is generally more secure...

How can you assert this? Did you read the source code? (Either yourself, or - if you don't feel competent enoug - had independent experts review it ?)

Currently, the fruit's reputation is entirely based on speculations and deductions and current absence/lower amount of publicly reported security issue.
Guesses can be wrong, reports might be silenced.

Google isn't better yet:
Yes, the base android system itself is actually open-source (see AOSP), but most of the juicy bits live in the "optional" Google Play Services ("optional" meaning that it's required by a horrifyingly large proportion of popular apps, so even if your smartphone can boot android without it, tons of applications will refuse to start) and that service is closed source and heavily controlled and licensed under stringent terms by Google.
You can inspect AOSP's source all you want, that won't prevent Google from raping your privacy as much they want from the closed services.
Though, at least, there are efforts to re-write an open-source alternative to these services.

Currently there aren't that many good alternatives either:

At least Jolla (ex engineers of the Nokia Maemo/Meego team) have written Sailfish, whose base (mer project) is opensource and the interface is mostly written in QML, so even it some bits aren't technically "opensource" from the licensing point of view, at least it passes the "source code readable" part.
(They promised to eventually re-lisence and opensource those bits, but they aren't there yet).
Also, currently no *open-source* Android compatibility layer (and that one is NOT going to get relicensed), so it makes a very small limited choice of available apps.

Also worth mentionning is Purism who are working on their Librem 5 smartphone, supposedly 100% completely opensource (even open source drivers, no blobs) and a hardware switch controlling a separate cell modem (no modem-functions-as-northbridge craziness as in most Qualcomm chipsets).
But, well, we aren't there yet (still delays in getting the target FressScale iMX8 chipset working), and of course most of mainstream will complain that the chip is very outdated and under powered compared to other phone.
They might work some opensource AndBox-based compatibility layer, so together with AOSP (and optionnally microG) there might be possibilities to get some opensource auditable stack working there.