Chinese technology brand Huawei is slowly moving ahead to become more self-reliant. The company has officially announced its new operating system called HarmonyOS that it was reported to be working on for a long time. With the new operating system, Huawei would not have to be completely dependent on Android. In the company’s home country China, the software will be called as Hongmeng.
According to the company, the operating system can be used in a number of gadgets like smartphones, smart speakers, wearables and others. Huawei will be releasing it all over the globe as an open-source platform.
A number of reports about Huawei’s in-house operating system had started circulating online when Google had paused its business with the company in May this year after the US government announced a trade ban. With this, the company’s Android license was also suspended. After that, Huawei was not very secretive about working on its own operating system.
Huawei has said that it will first be launching its HarmonyOS on “smart screen products” later this year. It has also been announced that the first of these products will be the Honor Smart Screen, which will be unveiled on Saturday. Prior to this, a report in Reuters also said that the OS will be present on a range of Honor smart TVs. Products that are being launched in China will get the operating system first and only then it will expand to other markets.
According to Huawei CEO Richard Yu, HarmonyOS is “completely different from Android and iOS,” as it has the ability to scale across various devices. He further said, “You can develop your apps once, then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices.”
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 #HDC2019 pic.twitter.com/2TD9cgtdG8
— Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) August 9, 2019
Much like Google‘s experimental Fuchsia OS, HarmonyOS will run on various form factors like smartphones and Internet of Things devices. It will also be rolled out to other devices in the next three years. As of now, the company will continue using Android on its devices. However, it is not clear till when it can continue to do this. According to a report in CNBC, the company has said that it is still “waiting on an update” to find out.
Developers would be needed to recompile their apps for Huawei’s new HarmonyOS software. According to the Chinese technology brand, they will be able to compile a range of languages into machine code in one single environment. However, as of now, there is no clarity on how easy will that be.
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