Huawei announces HarmonyOS, claims it is faster and more secure than Android 

Huawei has officially anunced HarmonyOS – called Hongmeng OS in China – its pan B operating system designed from ground up to potentially replace Android on all its future smartphones (and Windows on its upcoming laptops). Huawei in fact is going a step ahe, claiming that its microkernel-based HarmonyOS, is a distributed OS for all scenarios - smartphones, laptops, wearables, basically all connected devices. 

At its developer conference 2019 in China, Huawei anunced that it will kick off proceedings with smart TVs - possibly by end of this year – followed by wearables and laptops by 2020. company is still bullish about its future with Google’s Android, which is why it is still sticking to script – it will only use HarmonyOS in its smartphones in  worst-case scenario. 

At same time, Huawei seems confident about its home-grown operating system – in fact, it is going so far as to say that HarmonyOS is faster, smoor (due to presence of a dedicated deterministic latency engine and its light-weight nature in general) and more secure (due to its microkernel design) than Android. HarmonyOS will be open source (like much of Android is) with its own ARK compiler and it will support existing Android apps, Huawei has confirmed.  

Huawei has been in thick of things lately. Chinese conglomerate has been effectively barred from using Android in long-term following a recent US tre clampdown. Even though Android is open source and even though Huawei is free to use this open source version of Android (called AOSP), Google has been grually moving OS essentials out – which means a large part of Android that we use w isn’t open source per se. This includes everything from Google Play Store to apps like Google Maps and Gmail. 

Without proper authorization from Google, Huawei can’t even update its existing Android devices with latest security patches. And Google can’t authorize that until it gets a go-ahe from US government.  

recently concluded G20 summit raised hope that China and US are in-sync to find some sort of middle ground – summit also ended on a positive te with President Trump giving a ‘verbal’ go-ahe to US companies to start selling products to Huawei. Huawei still isn’t off ‘entity list’ though which means US companies will still require some sort of approval from Trump ministration before selling ir components to company. 

Which is where HarmonyOS comes into picture. And one can’t help but tice ‘strategic’ naming to reflect how Huawei wants to work in ‘harmony’ with Google, Microsoft, et al (basically all major US-based tech companies) towards ‘shared’ betterment of industry as a whole – something that it has also been very vocal about.