Second version of Huawei’s HarmonyOS announced

A new version of HarmonyOS was announced today at the Huawei Developer Conference by CEO Richard Yu, reports GSM Arena.

The platform was first revealed last year and now the company is ready to take it bigger. 

A beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK will be available to developers starting September 10. At the moment, it’s just meant for TVs, smartwatches, and in-car entertainment systems. 

A beta version for smartphones is coming this December. The company has confirmed that phones running HarmonyOS will be launched next year. No timeline has been given and the in-house operating system will initially be available in China only.

Huawei has also launched the OpenHarmony project, which is kind of like the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). It is open to third-party manufacturers, and this will incentivize more developers to create apps for the ecosystem. Since this is a cross-device platform, the same version of an app will be compatible with various types of hardware.

Yu wants to take the proprietary OS international and is hoping it would give Chinese developers a chance to serve global consumers and vice versa. 

The company says that the open-source project currently supports devices with 128KB to 128MB of RAM and it is planning to expand it to devices with 4GB of RAM by April 2021. The memory limit will be removed before October 2021.

Huawei also talked about various Harmony OS 2.0 features during the conference such as its adaptive user interface, AI audiovisual for voice recognition, and improved security.

Since Google has cut ties with the company, its phones now come with an open-source version of Android and lack Google Mobile Services. As an alternative, it has introduced Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), under which it currently offers around 96,000 apps.

In contrast, rival Google and Apple provide millions of apps through their app stores.

Honor Vision and Huawei Router AX3 are two of a few devices that currently run Huawei’s operating system and its reach is 490 million users at the moment. The company has no plants to replace Android entirely with its own OS following the arrival of HarmonyOS 2.0.