Huawei’s Harmony OS is coming to smartphones, with code release promised for October 2021

Huawei has been in a tight spot in the past couple of years, and their situation keeps getting tighter. But the Chinese giant has no intention of going anywhere, at least not without putting up a good fight. Last year, at HDC 2019, Huawei had announced its own first-party operating system, Harmony OS, showing off an important piece of its vision for the future. Harmony OS was shown off first on the Honor Vision Smart TV, and Huawei remained committed to Android at the time for its smartphone needs. The company reiterated those plans again in December 2019. But recent developments have forced the company to rethink its strategy. At HDC 2020, Huawei has now announced that Harmony OS will come to smartphones after all, with an expected beta SDK by the end of 2020, and a phone release around October 2021.

Harmony OS 2.0 was the main theme of the announcement today, with the new update bringing changes to the software bus, data management, and security on the OS, as well as the introduction of an adaptive UX framework. With this update, Huawei is also hoping to make good on its promise to open-source Harmony OS, giving the public access to its SDK packages, emulators, and IDE tools. The open-source project has been donated to the China Open Atomic Open Source Foundation, and will be launched in stages. The mobile bits of the project, including the SDK, will be available in beta by the end of 2020.

“Starting on 10 September, HarmonyOS is open to 128KB-128MB IoT devices, such as smart TVs, wearables, cars, and more. In April 2021, we will open it to 128MB-4GB devices and in October 2021, HarmonyOS will be opened for devices above 4GB.”

Mr. Richard Yu, CEO, Huawei CBG

As quoted above, Huawei also plans to open source the entire Harmony OS through the OpenHarmony project. This would allow developers to build an open-source version of the OS, much like what you can do for Android with AOSP. This would be crucial in driving adoption across different surface vectors, especially with how much weight Huawei themselves would be putting behind this OS. We could not locate the project link yet, but we will update the article when we have more information.

The post Huawei’s Harmony OS is coming to smartphones, with code release promised for October 2021 appeared first on xda-developers.

from xda-developers https://ift.tt/3iup7bv
via IFTTT