Huawei has already started with the replacement of Android by Harmony OS in its devices

Huawei has announced its intention to migrate around 100 models different from smartphones originally equipped with the Android platform, to your own Harmony OS. The first models to migrate are its flagship devices, such as the Mate 40, Mate 30, P40 and Mate X2 which will receive the first updates in a matter of days. For the rest of the devices, the updates will be carried out in stages.

It is noteworthy that said migration will not affect usersAs in fact, the Harmony OS edition for smartphones is not a separate operating system, but just another Android modification, which matches Android in terms of interface elements, applications and service services.

In the emulator proposed for testing, the interface completely coincided with Android 10, but judging by the prototype shown in the presentation, the platform has already been updated to Android 11, as it includes features of this branch.

Let us remember that the project Harmony has been in development since 2017 and is a microkernel operating system. The project developments are released under the BSD license as part of the OpenHarmony project, which is overseen by the non-profit organization China Open Atomic Open Source Foundation.

The differences with Android are mainly reduced to the change of brand, in addition to that instead of using the Android application store (Playstore), it makes use of its own application catalog (AppGallery), it is also compatible with Super Device technology to organize communication with other user devices by replacing the interface to configure the device and providing an enhanced EMUI shell, which was previously installed on Huawei devices on Android.

Despite the coincidence of names, Harmony OS for smartphones does not overlap with the Harmony OS edition for IoT devices, which is being developed in the OpenHarmony repository and is based on its own Lite OS microkernel.

At the same time, despite the complete coincidence of all the details of the interface and services in the prototypes available for testing (including the storage of the Android name in the names of the processes), Huawei representatives in an interview with TechCrunch they go on to argue that Harmony OS is a standalone operating system that has no common Android lines of code.

In this case, Huawei representatives do not detail which edition of Harmony OS they are talking about and manipulate the fact that the same Harmony OS platform name is used for smartphones and IoT devices, and Harmony OS for IoT devices does not really have nothing to do with Android.

Interestingly, Huawei's president of software products confirmed in an interview with the German edition ComputerBase which Harmony OS uses the AOSP code (Android Open Source Project) for smartphones and that the new platform is made as similar as possible to Android so as not to change the familiar interface for users. Huawei is said to meet all the requirements and licenses under which the Android code is distributed.

Also Huawei said last month that it expects more than 300 million devices (in Chinese) run Harmony OS by the end of the year. The company said it is speaking with 200 global application developers to create applications for the platform.

Finally, it is also mentioned that The migration is scheduled to be completed in the first quarter of next year. At the same time, the first tablet, smartphone and smartwatch is introduced and will ship immediately with Harmony OS.

The new smartwatch is expected to have a Lite OS-based Harmony OS variant (previous Huawei smartwatches ship with Lite OS). Those. If Huawei previously supplied tablets and smartphones for Android and smart watches for Lite OS, now it will supply them in different versions of the Harmony OS operating system, which are in fact the same Android and Lite OS.

Source: https://arstechnica.com


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