May 1 (NBD) -- Huawei, China's largest telecom equipment provider, has been building its substitute to Android, South China Morning Post reported citing anonymous sources.

When reached by NBD for comments, Huawei denied the news, saying that the company doesn't have the plan to launch its own smartphone OS (Operating System) in the foreseeable future. Huawei focuses on Android-based products and takes an open attitude towards mobile OSs, the company added.

To date, Google's Android and Apple's iOS have dominated the OS market. The biggest difference between these two lies in the openness. Android is an open-source system, which means anyone can look at the operating system's code, change it and create custom operating systems from it. In contrast, iOS is a more closed system, since there's no real possibility of making a new operating system from it.

The openness and inclusiveness of Android has allowed lots of Chinese phone makers to gain a foothold in the global market.

According to the report of People's Daily Overseas Edition, Chinese phone manufacturers posted bright results in Europe and Southeast Asia regions. For instance, over the latest six months, among the 11 bestselling smartphones in Spain, 6 are developed by Huawei and two by Xiaomi Inc. OPPO has taken the second position in Vietnam's smartphone market with a market share of 22 percent.

The prevailing presence of homemade smartphones in overseas markets pushes up the popularity of Android.

Data from Statista, an online statistics portal, shows in the first quarter of 2017, 86.1 percent of all smartphones sold to end users were phones with the Android operating system. The ratio was only 1.6 percent back in the first quarter of 2009.

Considering the fact Android is free, people are wondering how Google makes money from this popular operating system.

The biggest chunk would come from advertising. In 2017, Google's revenue amounted to 109.65 billion U.S. dollars and Google's revenue is largely made up by advertising revenue, according to Statista. Advertising services are provided via Google's YouTube, Google Map, Gmail and other software. As a large variety of Google apps are pre-installed into Android-powered smart phones, Google could reap a staggering amount of advertising income from this Android-based ecosystem.

In addition to ads, apps constitute another major income source as users pay for the downloads of many Android apps. At the Google I/O developer conference in 2015, Google disclosed Android apps generated 10 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2014.

Some analysts held despite that Google's official app store Google Play generated less revenue than Apple's App Store, Android, as an open-sourced operating system, continuously builds up its user base.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn