What I mean is that OS are now just a mean to gain users and sell them something sideways.
Android was released free to quickly get a huge user base using Chrome, Google and being exposed to Google advertising. This was stated explicitly in many blogs and articles.
Any other OS will have the same goal.

My point behind is that OS is now like these bottle vending machine that coca-cola gave away for free to sell there beverage behind. It's no longer a way to make money per se.
IOW, OS no longer brings a competitive advantage by itself.

The funny thing is that Linux was probably the originator of this movement; fighting against MS monopoly gave Google another quasi-monopoly.

BTW, as the smartphone market being now almost saturated (from what I see in public transportation), unless this Chinese OS pays his clients, I doubt it can gain a place, except maybe in countries with a lower rate of equipment. That'll cost huge spending on marketing and advertisement, they better have a solid business model behind…

>>>Android fought the mobile OS battle quite successfully -- for the sake of Chrome.
>>>This war is also over
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>Some cynics say it's barely begun, with Chinese OS just on the horizon. ;-)
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>>>what is sure is that users prefer web apps, even slower, clumsier and with perhaps less features
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>Yet Yahoo says that users spend almost 90% of their time online, using apps. But most users have lots of apps they hardly ever use and eventually delete. In my case, I watch carefully what access rights are demanded by an updating app. Most recently my US banking app wanted access to contacts and images. Why does a banking app need those? I get the images - since the app allows me to deposit checks by photographing them- but contacts? I deleted the app, just as I stopped using the native Android email with its cavalier privacy. Unless app authors are smart, this is a great way to turn people like me back towards the web.
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>>>another sure fact is that 2.5% of the users renew each year -- 40% over the 16 last years -- these new comers grew up with the web
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>The drumbeat for web apps is "we can be just as good as native apps!" which is where the focus belongs IMHO. If it's true without excessive download baggage, then there are plenty of reasons to prefer web apps, not least privacy. But Google has its sights on that as well, embedding web apps more closely into Android and presumably following usual snooping lines: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/11/google_progressive_web_apps/