Huawei on Wednesday officially announced its homegrown operating system HarmonyOS NEXT, marking its official separation from the Android ecosystem.
Huawei announced that it has released an OS for select smartphones and tablets equipped with its Kirin and Kunpeng chips and has “officially begun public beta testing.”
Unlike previous versions of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps.
Huawei insists that China’s top companies are undaunted by it. Companies that have developed native apps for the OS include Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com. For those unfamiliar, these are China’s top shopping, payment, and social media apps.
Huawei also claimed that more than 15,000 HarmonyOS native applications and meta services were also launched at the time of the announcement. That’s an impressive number, but it’s nowhere near the millions of apps in the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.
The Chinese tech company also revealed that the operating system has 110 million lines of code and claimed that mobile devices running it will see a 30% increase in overall performance. It also claims to extend battery life by 56 minutes and leave an average of 1.5 GB of memory for purposes other than running the OS.
If you like the sound of improved performance on your smartphone or tablet (the OS runs on either and has a consistent interface), unfortunately, Huawei has no plans to offer Harmony OS NEXT outside of China at this time. Report what you told us. This is despite the company previously saying it plans to move older versions of HarmonyOS offshore.
Huawei tried without success to export the final version of its OS, including offering help to developers who coded for the platform and targeted offshore markets.
However, they were able to get an offshore entity to develop for the platform. Singapore-based ride-sharing app Grab and airline Emirates have developed apps for the OS.
The release marks a moment in China’s push for technological independence. Before the upgrade, Huawei’s HarmonyOS still relied on the Android open source project for core functionality. The move is a result of 2019 US sanctions that blocked Huawei’s access to Google mobile services. That dependency has now been resolved.
Huawei wants to introduce its OS to PCs as well. Last month, Yu Chengdong, chairman of the Chinese giant’s consumer business group, revealed that future machines would not run Windows, but instead run Harmony OS. There are still no answers as to when such a machine will arrive or whether other PC manufacturers will use the OS. ®
