14 DAY TRIAL // Huawei has finally unveiled Harmony OS, the Android replacement operating system that’ supposed to keep them afloat if the trade war between the United States and China goes on for much longer.
Every company that builds phones dreams of a day when they don’t have to pay royalties to Google for using their Android OS. That can only be done by making their own operating system, and it’s not like they haven’t tried.
In fact, Android had a lot of competition over the years and some of the biggest names on the market, like Microsoft and Samsung, tried to put a dent into this monopoly. Neither Samsung or Microsoft was able to build a worthy adversary, despite having the resource to do it.
Harmony OS is born out of necessity
The United States put a lot of pressure on Huawei by not allowing American companies to do business with Chinese conglomerate, and one of the problems was the use of Android. Even though Huawei got an extension, it’s clear that the company doesn’t want to be in that position ever again.
Huawei was rumored to have been working on a new operating system for quite some time, and now the company finally revealed it during the Huawei’s Developer Conference, according to XDA Developers.
The operating system was in the works for a couple of years already, but the recent developments forced the company to take action and accelerated the production. As it stands right now, Harmony OS is available on Honor Vision TV, but that’s likely to change.
From what Huawei revealed until now, the new OS is using a micro-kernel, just like Android. This basically means that the kernel is built with only the required drivers and components to keep it light and to be able to deploy it fast on multiple devices.
The Chinese company is also saying that Harmony OS is faster than Android because the connections between the hardware (camera, sensors, etc.) and various parts of the operating system are made through a single layer. For now, these are only claims, and we’ll have to wait for an actual device that can be compared.
Furthermore, Huawei promises to provide developers with a tool named Huawei’s ARK Compiler, which can be used to compile code from other programming languages for Harmony. In theory, it should be easy to make apps directly for this OS.
The cherry on top is that Harmony OS will become open-source, sometime in the future.
