Huawei partners with Yandex and Booking.com for its mapping service

A few days ago, Huawei launched its own operating system named HarmonyOS and now the company is reportedly working on its own business-facing mapping service named Mapkit. Now a report claims that the Chinese company has already got a few companies recruited for this project, including Yandex, Booking.com, Kayak.com, Cheapflights, and more.

As per the report, the Huawei Mapkit will be a business-facing mapping service and could get launched in October this year. The Huawei Mapkit is not meant for end-users but rather an SDK for application developers to build location-based services on top. Huawei plans to make the software suite available in 40 languages and roll it out in 150 countries.

According to the report, the Mapkit will support apps to offer real-time traffic conditions and sophisticated navigation systems as well as support augmented-reality mapping. It will also be able to recognize a car changing lanes, which suggests that it will offer extremely high precision location data.

It remains to be seen from where the company will be sourcing location data. But it seems that Huawei has several options — China’s own satellite navigation system BeiDou, Russia’s GLONASS, Europe’s Galileo, as well as AutoNavi, which is a subsidiary of Alibaba.

From the developments of Huawei, it is clear that the company is reducing its reliance on US-based companies. It is aiming to get more independence from Google and is getting prepared in case the US government doesn’t end the ban implied on the company.