By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 11th, 2024
Recently, Huawei has finally officially announced its long-awaited operating system called HarmonyOS. The company claims it will be available on every device ranging from smart speakers to wearables.
Huawei just recently finally announced its new operating system which, as the company claims, will be available on a variety of devices ranging from speakers, in-car systems to wearables. The new operating system is called HarmonyOS, but in China, this software will be known as Hongmeng.
Another interesting factor is that Huawei will release this OS as an open-source platform in order to raise more adoption.
Moreover, this is a result of the most recent ongoings with the company. Recently the US Government puts Huawei on the Entity List, claiming that the company is a subject of internal security. This means that the US government forbids other companies to do business with Huawei. Also, the government accused Huawei of stealing trade secrets. Plus all that, in May, Google suspended Huawei’s Android license. Since then, Huawei hasn’t been shy about sharing that they are in the works of making their own operating system.
It is known that users will have a possibility to get acquainted with Harmony OS later this year. It is a microkernel-based distributed system that is “more powerful and secure than Android,” said the company CEO of the consumer division, Richard Yu.
At the company’s developer conference, he said that that HarmonyOS’ IPC performance is five times that of Google’s Fuchsia. However, he didn’t quite back his claims, since he didn’t show a proper example.
“A modularized HarmonyOS can be nested to adapt flexibly to any device to create a seamless cross-device experience. Developed via the distributed capability kit, it builds the foundation of a shared developer ecosystem,” reads a statement by Huawei.
Additionally, the company revealed that they have been working on this project for almost as long as 10 years.
However, at the moment, the company is still using Android on its phones. As the company describes, the legal side of this is not 100% clear for them, but they have seen a little more easing attitude from the US Government and Google regards its Android usage license.
“We will prioritize Android for smartphones, but if we can’t use Android, we will be able to install HarmonyOS quickly,” noted Richard Yu.
Moreover, Richard Yu added that for now, Huawei would limit the operating system only to China with later plans to expand to international markets.
Recently, we have reported that Huawei announced its plans for launching a new smartphone in Q4. The new HarmonyOS-powered phone would cost around $290.