Huawei Introduces 'HarmonyOS', Its First Home-Grown Operating System

09/08/2019

The tech sphere is evolving, and the competition between the players in the industry has never been so tense.

Ever since the U.S. administration put an export ban on Chinese companies, Huawei as one of the largest, as experienced continuous threats to its mobile business, especially since many parts of its products, both hardware and software, come from the U.S.

Huawei has been making claims that it didn't really need Android, and could start its own operating system if it needed to.

And on this is where the company announced 'HarmonyOS', its very first home-grown mobile operating system that can operate without depending on Google's iron fist.

At the Huawei Developer Conference 2019, Richard Yu, CEO of the company’s Consumer Business Group, said that:

"We needed an OS that supports all scenarios, that can be used across a broad range of devices and platforms, and that can meet consumer demand for low latency and strong security."

Huawei gave a Chinese-language presentation on HarmonyOS, which included only a vague overview of the operating system, with Yu saying that:

"HarmonyOS is completely different from Android and iOS [Apple’s operating system]… you can develop your apps [and] then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices."

"It has trustworthy and secure architecture and ensures smooth experience across all scenarios."

Initially however, or at least on its introduction, Huawei isn't targeting any smartphones in particular with its HarmonyOS.

From what was announced, Huawei wants the OS to first debut on the "Honor Smart Screen" and Huawei TVs. Huawei said HarmonyOS on smartphones could indeed be the future, but in the meantime, Huawei still prefers Android.

On its announcement, Huawei described HarmonyOS as "a microkernel-based OS, distributed OS for all scenarios."

Huawei said that the OS can run across a range of form factors, and the company even pulled out the old "write once, run everywhere" claim to app developers. Huawei spent some time saying that Android's kernel uses resource scheduling model that lacks the smoothness.

And this is where Huawei wants to introduce HarmonyOS' Ark Compiler as a solution to the long-old Android problem.

The company is also putting HarmonyOS as an open-source project, hoping that it will attract third-party developers that will fuel its growth.

Read: How Huawei 'ARK Compiler' Wants To Revolutionize Android To Be More Like IOS

Richard Yu - Huawei Developer Conference 2019
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group, at the 2019 Huawei Developer Conference

HarmonyOS is somehow similar to Samsung's Tizen OS, in which was created for the same reasons.

At that time, Samsung wanted to become less dependent on Google in the mobile market. Tizen was originally developed to limit Google's influence on Samsung, which in turn is to decrease Samsung's reliance on Android.

In other words, Tizen was Samsung's "Plan B".

HarmonyOS or Tizen, are also like Windows Phone, Blackberry 10, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, or Firefox OS.

They are all regarded as third-party operating systems, developed with the primary intention to make their respective manufacturer independent from Google.

"If we cannot use it (Android) in the future, we can immediately switch to HarmonyOS," said Yu, claiming that moving from Android to HarmonyOS is a "very convenient" process.

But considering that most of the world's mobile phones use Android, these third-party operating systems have huge problems in adoption because they won't have any apps Android users have. Google apps such as Gmail, YouTube and Chrome browser won't be available on those operating systems, unless the manufacturers make commercial agreement with Google.

As a result, the operating systems will always have a more limited usage.

However, Huawei is already conquering half of the mobile consumer market in China. This essentially makes the push a lot easier. Huawei is also benefiting from the Great Firewall of China, where most Google apps are already banned in mainland China.

Huawei officially released HarmonyOS 2.0 in June 2021.