HTC seemingly denies its involvement in China's Operating System, reaffirms support for Android and Windows

Last week, news broke about a fresh operating system developed by China’s Academy of Sciences in collaboration with a local company. Apparently dubbed China Operating System (COS), the new platform will try to solve “security and usability” issues that non-Chinese OSes - led by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS - may have.

We heard that China Operating System received HTC’s support - alongside the obvious support of Chinese smartphone makers and mobile operators. The new platform, reportedly built on a security-enhanced Linux kernel, was seen running on several HTC devices, including the HTC One, HTC Butterfly, and the old Flyer tablet. However, HTC seems to deny its support for this OS.

According to a statement received by Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA), HTC said that it remained “focused on working with its current OS partners” and it would not “comment on speculation regarding other systems.” At the moment, HTC’s OS partners are Google and Microsoft, as the Taiwanese company is selling both Android and Windows Phone handsets. Perhaps the company is denying its involvement in COS just for now, and will reveal something about this at a later date. We can't know for sure.

COS is approved by the Chinese government, and its developers hope that it will become China’s national OS someday. That would be a serious blow to Android, which currently runs on about 90% of the smartphones used in China. Of course, we don't think that Android will lose its leading position, at least not in the foreseeable future. But anything can happen after all, so we'll keep an eye on this to see how things evolve.

source: Yonhap News / CNA