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Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, whose company is working on its own smartphone operating system to replace Android.
- Huawei's effort to build a replacement for Android is probably going to fail, mobile industry experts told Business Insider.
- Building an operating system is easy; developing the services and app ecosystem to go with it isn't, they said.
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Huawei's effort to replace Android with its own smartphone operating system may well be an impossible task.
That's the take of former mobile industry executives who spoke with Business Insider recently. Building the operating system itself won't be all that difficult, they said. What will likely prove to be a Herculean endeavor will be developing the services and app ecosystem for it that consumers around the world have come to expect.
"It's is extremely challenging," said Andreas Gal, the former chief technology officer at Mozilla, who helped lead the development of that organization's Firefox OS.