HDC 2020: HarmonyOS is finally coming to Huawei smartphones in 2021

Amid the early days of their ongoing issues with the U.S. government, Huawei announced HarmonyOS. Initially seen as an alternative to the Android operating system for Huawei’s mobile devices, its progress has stalled somewhat over the past year or so—we’ve only seen Smart TVs running on HarmonyOS so far.

However, the Chinese company has now finally set a timeline for HarmonyOS on smartphones. During the Huawei Developer Conference 2020, Huawei announced HarmonyOS 2.0—which will also be open-source (just like the Android Open Source Project), with developers to have access to SDK packages, IDE tools, and emulators.

A HarmonyOS beta release for smartphones will first be available to China developers at the end of 2020, with Huawei CEO Richard Yu providing a timeline for future supported devices:

“Starting on 10 September, HarmonyOS is open to 128KB-128MB IoT devices, such as smart TVs, wearables, cars and more. In April 2021, we will open it to 128MB-4GB devices and in October 2021, HarmonyOS will be opened for devices above 4GB.”

This basically means that we are set to see Huawei smartphones running on HarmonyOS 2.0 in 2021—at long last.

The idea behind HarmonyOS is one of seamless cross-platform functionality, ranging from IoT devices such as wearables and Smart TVs to cars, and of course, smartphones. For example, users should be able to answer a video call from their phone—via a larger screen device, such as a Smart TV. Shared resources within the ecosystem (between devices) should also theoretically mean that integration is seamless—although we’ll reserve judgement for now.

It seems likely that Huawei is finally moving forward with plans to replace Android on their mobile devices. After a year of extensions and planning, the U.S. Commerce Department doesn’t appear to be budging from its initial assessment of Huawei as a “security risk”. While Huawei’s new smartphones still run on Android, they run on an open-source version of Android—without, obviously, Google Mobile Services.

And what about current Huawei phones that are running on Android (GMS and non-GMS)? Will these older devices be compatible with HarmonyOS? Time will tell.

You can watch the entire HDC 2020 here:

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