The excessively dynamic nature of tech ensures that most companies have to depend on others, for one or another aspect of their product. While this has its merits, in the sense that it makes things slightly decentralized and ensure the tech economy is thriving, the flip side for a company is over-dependence on a potential rival for certain services.
Huawei had this realisation when US kicked in slew of tariffs on China and the mainland-based companies. It compelled the company to launch its own operating system named HarmonyOS. And this time around, its Facebook, which isn’t happy being dependent on Google’s Android for all of its business, and is hence finding a way out. The social networking giant is now reportedly working on its own OS that will be powering the company’s hardware products, the likes of which include Oculus VR headsets and Portal devices.
Report coming from The Information claims that the company is currently working on its own operating system but the name of the said OS is not been known yet. It has also reported that the software is being developed from scratch. The company has hired WindowsNT co-creator to lead the OS development team.
Its noteworthy that this isn’t the first attempt of the social media giant Facebook to enter the operating systems space. The company earlier tried making an OS for Home but it later dropped the idea and adopted Google’s Android.
This is a major move given that the Facebook’s own operating system will enable the company to become self sufficient and reduce its dependence on third-party softwares. The company could also tailor the software as per the requirements and don’t have to make heavy modifications to OS which aren’t actually build for experimental hardware.
Along with the operating system, Facebook is also reportedly working on its own smart voice assistant, similar to Siri and Alexa from Apple and Amazon respectively. As per the report, the company has even approached Microsoft to license data from its Bing search engine to train the assistant.
