Chinese researchers have developed a new mobile operating system intended to break the dominance in China of systems produced by Google, Apple and Microsoft.
At a ceremony in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai-based Liantong Network Communications Technology unveiled the domestically produced China Operating System, or COS, designed for use on many devices including smartphones and personal computers.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences called COS a strategic product for national security, urgently needed following revelations regarding United States surveillance and Microsoft Windows ending further support of its XP
system, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.
The COS is “completely” independently developed, from the basic coding to the user interface, said an article posted on the Chinese Academy of Sciences website.
It said existing open-source operating systems pose security risks, and foreign-made systems have “acclimatization” difficulties in China, problems that COS addresses.
Li Mingshu, director of the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said Wednesday that the researchers intend to continue making improvements to COS and match or even overtake other systems that dominate the Chinese market today.
Chen Feili, the deputy general manager of Liantong Network Communications Technology, told C114, a Chinese communications news website, that the Chinese telecom giants China Mobile and China Telecom have been testing phones based on COS over the past three months.
There’s already “a certain consensus” about bringing a commercial version of COS to market, Mr. Chen said. He said that discussions about business models and compatibility issues were already underway.
Though he declined to mention the names of the manufacturers, Mr. Chen said that there are already four smartphone models that use COS.
COS can run Java applications, and supports HTML 5 web applications and games, the C114 article said. It is currently compatible with over 100,000 applications, it said.
The state broadcaster CCTV showed COS in action on Thursday, in a news segment in which a reporter demonstrated that people could play popular games, including “Cut the Rope” and “Angry Birds” on an unbranded black mobile phone.
Mr. Chen said he has high ambitions for COS, saying the “ultimate goal” is to make it the main operating system in China. This is a lofty goal. According to the American market researcher International Data Corporation, China’s smartphone market is dominated by Android with nearly 90 percent of phones in 2013 running on the Google system.
COS is not the only domestically produced operating system to make headlines recently. On Jan. 9, the Chinese technology company Coship Electronics announced that it had produced the country’s first smartphone operating system with independent intellectual property rights. The company’s chairman, Yuan Ming, said that the system, called 960 OS, took 15 years to develop.
How long COS was under development and the costs of research and development were not disclosed.
Although the state-run People’s Daily praised COS on Thursday as the “realization of the Chinese Dream in the field of operating systems,” the online reaction from Chinese consumers was more scathing.
“Its full name should be Copy Other System,” said one user with the handle “byxu,” in one of the most upvoted comments on Sina weibo. “It’s not open source because they’re terrified that others will see that the source code is the same as Android, and accuse them of cheating the government out of money.”