With Huawei being temporarily banned based on American/Chinese relations, Huawei were put in a tough spot – not being allowed to do business with any American company. This wasn’t great for the Chinese company as many parts of their devices are built using American products and materials. Most notably, they couldn’t work with Google, leaving them without a significant element of their phones – Android.
Although this banner has been lifted, Huawei still put considerable time before and during the ban to create their own OS, it’s now been officially revealed as ‘HarmonyOS‘ at their annual developer conference.
HarmonyOS is “the first microkernel-based distributed OS for all scenarios,” CEO Richard Yu told attendees at the Huawei Developer Conference.
The new platform supports smartphones, smart speakers, computers, smartwatches, wireless earbuds, cars, and tablets. In fact, Yu says the platform supports RAM sizes ranging from kilobytes to gigabytes. The Huawei CEO also notes that the platform will eventually support a range of apps, specifically noting that HTML5, Linux, and Android apps will be compatible. “They will all be able to run on our OS in the future,” Yu says. Yu adds that the ARK Compiler used in HarmonyOS app development will also support Kotlin, Java, Javascript, C, and C++.
The elephant in the room is Android, will Huawei users be able to choose the OS on their device? The Huawei CEO said HarmonyOS can replace Android on its smartphones “at any time,” but that it will stick to Google’s platform. “If we cannot use Android in the future, then we can immediately switch to HarmonyOS,” Yu explained to attendees, adding that migrating from Android to the new platform “is not that difficult.”
The first product to use HarmonyOS will be the Honor Vision TV set, which will be launched in China tomorrow (August 10).
