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Harmony Officially Released by Huawei
While Huawei’s Hongmeng (Harmony) Operating System was technically released to developers in August of 2019, and even received an upgrade in September of last year, the official release of the OS this week comes with the ability to upgrade a number of phones and tablets to the operating system, along with the recently announced Huawei Watch 3 Pro wearable.
The OS, reduces latency by more than 25% as it focuses on tasks with high priorities and the kernel, essentially a bridge between applications and hardware processes, runs much less code than Android and is less prone to security issues. As Harmony operates as a distributed architecture, app developers will have to deal with far fewer device issues, reducing the modifications to allow apps to run on a variety of technologies. Harmony is an open source OS, with no license fee and a global Harmony ‘Foundation’ will be established by Huawei to support collaboration with developers.
The real test will be how well the OS is accepted in China where trade restrictions force phones to ship without Google ( Play services. According to the company last year the OS was already available on over 20 product categories, which would equate to over 12m 3rd party products and expects to equip between 300m and 400m devices with the OS this year but being ‘available’ does not mean it is used, only that it is available for download and supported.
Harmony is ‘free’, but in a technical sense so is Android, as Google does not charge for the OS itself, but only for ‘services’ that it supplies, which includes updates and help with version compatibility issues. If Harmony remains open source and is as easy to integrate with applications as the company still faces an upward battle as history shows that Blackberry Tizen, Windows Mobile, Ubantu, KaiOS and others have only a tiny fraction of the OS population.
While Huawei’s Hongmeng (Harmony) Operating System was technically released to developers in August of 2019, and even received an upgrade in September of last year, the official release of the OS this week comes with the ability to upgrade a number of phones and tablets to the operating system, along with the recently announced Huawei Watch 3 Pro wearable.
The OS, reduces latency by more than 25% as it focuses on tasks with high priorities and the kernel, essentially a bridge between applications and hardware processes, runs much less code than Android and is less prone to security issues. As Harmony operates as a distributed architecture, app developers will have to deal with far fewer device issues, reducing the modifications to allow apps to run on a variety of technologies. Harmony is an open source OS, with no license fee and a global Harmony ‘Foundation’ will be established by Huawei to support collaboration with developers.
The real test will be how well the OS is accepted in China where trade restrictions force phones to ship without Google ( Play services. According to the company last year the OS was already available on over 20 product categories, which would equate to over 12m 3rd party products and expects to equip between 300m and 400m devices with the OS this year but being ‘available’ does not mean it is used, only that it is available for download and supported.
Harmony is ‘free’, but in a technical sense so is Android, as Google does not charge for the OS itself, but only for ‘services’ that it supplies, which includes updates and help with version compatibility issues. If Harmony remains open source and is as easy to integrate with applications as the company still faces an upward battle as history shows that Blackberry Tizen, Windows Mobile, Ubantu, KaiOS and others have only a tiny fraction of the OS population.
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