Huawei open sourcing Harmony OS was a great move. What's needed now is more coordination within the Chinese software industry to adopt and contribute to it. The key to defeating US domination of software platforms is to embrace open source, transparency, and international collaboration at a genuine scale. Not to copy Google, but to out do Google, in making it accessible to *everyone* and the ecosystem associated with it, as well.
Basically, to beat first mover's advantage, you need to be more accessible and cheaper, and you need to sacrifice profits for the long-term benefits of getting people off of the US platform ecosystem.
For instance - Google Store, like Apple Store, charges a huge fee for application developers to do transactions through them. China can beat that by lowering or even eliminating that fee. Google and Apple hold monopolistic controls over much of their platform, despite the core platform being "open source" - this is, in fact, why they're able to ban Chinese applications on them in the first place. To beat that, you need to go full open source and prove to international partners that China will never be able to block access the way the US does.
There are going to costs. You could argue - "why would we even bother to make a separate platform if we can't make a profit like Google and Apple does?" But the value has become obvious, post-US sanctions. Getting people off of monopolistic Western platforms is the value, in and of itself.
Being willing to sacrifice for that goal is critical to winning the platform war.
