Huawei is looking to overhaul EMUI and also build their own mobile OS

Huawei makes and sells a rather large number of phones, selling over a 100 million last year alone. However, the bulk of those sales come from within China and Huawei wants to expand its market to Europe and beyond.

Unfortunately for Huawei, they have a reputation for simply copying iOS and Apple designs and are thus, not well-respected in Western circles. As The Verge points out, they don’t have a contract with any major US carrier either.

In a bid to fix that, Huawei has hired ex-Apple designer, Abigail Brody to work on their Android-based EMUI. With the redesign, Huawei hopes to offer an OS that is closer to stock Android in design, but offering a greater deal of flexibility and customisation.

The redesign will bring back Android’s app drawer and the colour palette will apparently shed its drag colour scheme in favour of something more lively, courtesy of Brody.

Brody envisions Huawei as becoming a smartphone brand and appreciated as a “lifestyle-centric” platform. She also hopes to help Huawei shed its image of being an iOS copycat.

EMUI aside, Huawei is also reportedly working on its own mobile OS. They’ve set up an office in Scandinavia where engineers, ex-Nokia employees among them, are working on the OS. It’s not clear why exactly Huawei is working on their own OS, especially when the likes of Samsung’s Tizen and even Windows Phone, with the might of Microsoft behind it, have failed to catch on.