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Huawei’s self-developed operating system “HarmonyOS” is being updated to version 2.0, the Chinese technology company announced at its Huawei Developers Conference on Thursday.
Currently, the operating system is only available for Huawei and Honor TVs. But in 2021, it will be installed on smartphones, a big move previously denied by the company.
“All Huawei smartphones in 2021 will be compatible with this operating system,” said Richard Yu, director of consumer business at Huawei.
The keyword for version 2.0 is “distributive”, allowing multiple Huawei products to work together seamlessly and provide an optimized experience for users.
Wang Chenglu, head of software for Huawei’s consumer business arm, told the conference that the interaction between HarmonyOS 2.0 devices will be much faster than current cross-device solutions.
“End-to-end latency can be as low as 10 milliseconds,” said Wang. “We also managed to merge WiFi and Bluetooth into one network.
Video / audio sync will no longer be a problem when connecting a HarmonyOS 2.0 TV to compatible smartphones and speakers.
Wang also compared the speed of the HarmonyOS 2.0 distributive network to that of the competition. “Reading and writing files can be four times the speed of Microsoft’s Samba protocol,” he said. “The performance of the OPS database is 1.3 times the speed of Android’s ContentProvider function. And the search speed is also 1.2 times the speed of Apple iOS’s Core Spotlight.”
Huawei is also building a device ecosystem with other electronics manufacturers. “Ovens, refrigerators, cars and many other third-party products with HarmonyOS 2.0 will be available soon,” said Wang.
Fully open source
Huawei has also promised to make HarmonyOS open source, which means that anyone can freely examine the system specification to make sure there are no issues.
Apple’s iOS and Microsoft Windows, for example, are not open source software, so no one outside of companies knows how these systems work.
Huawei announced the open source roadmap for HarmonyOS 2.0 during the same conference.
The code for small Internet of Things (IoT) devices with 128 megabytes or less of storage is now available.
“Anyone can rebuild the operating system from scratch and make it work,” Wang promised.
The code for larger devices will be released for free in April 2021 and the remaining code will be available for download in October 2021.
It is practically impossible for Huawei to create a loophole or add malware to open source code, as it is freely available for all governments around the world to examine and investigate.
Developer friendly
Huawei strives to attract application developers to join the HarmonyOS 2.0 ecosystem. So you’ve built an application framework, code compilers, and an integrated developer environment (IDE) from the ground up to help developers get started coding instantly.
“Some Chinese companies don’t like construction tools. But we do,” Wang said.
Huawei’s ecosystem is working on the Chinese mainland market. But outside of China, where more people prefer Google software, Huawei is having a difficult time promoting its own smartphones.
