Huawei has been dealt a huge blow as its partnership with Google has been terminated. This is because of the ban in the US on Huawei. It means that Google will not provide Android to Huawei and current Huawei devices are now stranded. In a few months time, Google services, as well as Android updates, might be stopped for Huawei devices. And it means that the company has to plan for an alternative if nothing works out with US and Google.
Last month, it was reported that Huawei might already be working on its Android alternative. One report also said that the work on its Android alternative is going on from last 7 years. However, we now have some contradictory reports about the same too. Apparently, Huawei is looking towards a Russian fork of Sailfish OS as its Android OS alternative. This has been reported recently by The Bell who has talked to people related to the matter.
Huawei CEO Guo Ping has discussed with Konstantin Noskov who is the minister of digital development, communications and mass media of Russia. This discussion was regarding the possibility of using Sailfish OS on their Huawei devices. Also, Huawei might already be testing the Sailfish OS fork on its devices with the pre-installed Aurora OS.
As a part of the deal, a move to Russia for production of their chips and devices was also discussed. If you are not aware of Sailfish OS, it is built on Linux too same as Android. But it is a rival of both Android and iOS. It is built by the developers behind MeeGo OS from Nokia.
Sailfish OS is also open-source which means there are various possibilities same as Android. Another aspect that makes Sailfish OS suitable is Android app compatibility and gesture-based navigation along with shortcuts for revealing UI elements and multi-tasking features.