The Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (under the Chinese government) in collaboration with local developer Shanghai Liantong created COS (China Operating System), a state operating system that aims to compete with iOS, Windows and Android and control data flow.
China’s new operating system is designed to run on PCs, smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes and all kinds of smart ‘gadgets’, according to the website of COS.
On the same website and the official Chinese newspaper “People’s Daily”, it is reported that it is an open source operating system based on Linux, like Android, born with the intention to “break the foreign monopoly in the software sector”, thus usually Apple, Microsoft and Google.
According to the Chinese daily, COS not only has a high performance in their native ‘apps’, it also supports applications designed in HTML5 and even Java.
Despite criticizing the open source operating systems such as Ubuntu and Android for security reasons, the “People’s Daily” features COS as a operating system able to “solve the problem”, in addition to describing it as “more suited to the national conditions of China” and support for the manufacturing industry.
This is not the first attempt to create an operating system by the Chinese government. Already in 2009, Chinese government tried to boost ‘OPhone’ without much success due to lack of support from major Chinese technology companies like Lenovo or Huawei.
This time indicate that the Chinese government will try to take advantage with the news of the NSA scandal to promote their product selling other foreign operating systems as a ‘back door’ for data espionage.