Huawei launches its own operating system called HarmonyOS

After Huawei found itself on the “entity list,” which banned it from buying products and components (including licensing Google’s Android) from U.S. companies, the Chinese giant teased its own smartphone operating system. 

Now, that OS has officially been launched as HarmonyOS — but it’s not exactly focused on smartphones. 

Revealed at the Huawei Developer Conference in Dongguan, China, by the company CEO Richard Yu, HarmonyOS is a “distributed OS” that lets developers develop their apps once, then “flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices.”

This is in contrast to Android and Apple’s iOS, which are separate (though partially compatible) with the companies’ other platforms. 

This means that HarmonyOS will, in theory, offer the same experience on a variety of devices, such as smart TVs, tablets and phones. In practice, though, Huawei first plans to deploy HarmonyOS to a product called the Honor Smart Screen, would be unveiled this Saturday and launch later this year. 

Over the next three years, HarmonyOS should arrive to other devices, including wearables and cars.

This is more akin to Samsung’s Tizen, which was also once touted as an alternative to Android but is now mainly powering the company’s smart TVs and wearables. 

Besides its distributed nature, Huawei also highlights HarmonyOS “microkernel architecture,” meaning the OS’ kernel will be extremely small, making HarmonyOS both fast and resilient to attacks. There’s also something called “Deterministic Latency Engine,” which should make HarmonyOS better at prioritizing tasks and scheduling them in advance, which, again, should improve performance.

Notably, Google is also working on a microkernel-based, multi-platform operating system called Fuchsia. 

HarmonyOS will be released as a worldwide, open-source platform. However, Huawei says it plans to “lay the foundations” of HarmonyOS in China, and expand globally later. 

Huawei’s position in the U.S. has improved somewhat in June, with president Trump allowing the company to buy some U.S. technology. This could mean that Huawei will be able to continue producing Android-based smartphones as before, while slowly developing HarmonyOS as a sort of backup.