Huawei Announces Newest Version of HarmonyOS

Huawei announced its HarmonyOS platform at its developer conference last year, and it’s now announced Harmony OS 2.0.

Huawei has said its new version of HarmonyOS operating system will be ready for development use on smartphones beginning in December, and expects phones with the new software to come in 2021, reads a new report from CNBC. Beyond this, HarmonyOS will be made available to other hardware makers for use on non-Huawei devices.

Huawei Business Group chairman Richard Yu announced HarmonyOS 2.0, the updated version of its still-young software platform, on stage during the company’s annual developer conference taking place in China this week, along with the news of its impending arrival on smartphones.

The Chinese brand confirmed that a beta version of the Harmony OS 2.0 SDK will be available from September 10 2020 on smartwatches, TVs, and head units. The firm added that a beta version of the developer tools will come to smartphones in December 2020.

“So maybe starting from next year, we’ll see smartphones with Harmony OS,” Yu said.

Analysts say HarmonyOS is the closest solution to a replacement that Huawei has, after its addition to the US entity list in May last year, which barred Google from providing technical support for new Huawei phone models using Android, and from Google Mobile Services, the bundle of developer services upon which most Android apps are based.

Huawei also launched the OpenHarmony project, which is kind of like the Android Open Source Project. It’s 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.