Huawei Makes Divorce From Android Official With HarmonyOS NEXT Launch (theregister.com) 67
The Register's Laura Dobberstein reports: Huawei formally launched its home-brewed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT, on Wednesday, marking its official separation from the Android ecosystem. Huawei declared it released and "officially started public beta testing" of the OS for some of its smartphones and tablets that run its own Kirin and Kunpeng chips.
Unlike previous iterations of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps. Huawei maintains top Chinese outfits aren't deterred by that. It cited Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com as among those who have developed native apps for the OS. In case you're not familiar, they're China's top shopping, payment, and social media apps.
Huawei also claimed that at the time of its announcement, over 15,000 HarmonyOS native applications and meta-services were also launched. That's a nice number, but well short of the millions of apps found on the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store. The Chinese tech player also revealed that the operating system has 110 million lines of code and claimed it improves the overall performance of mobile devices running it by 30 percent. It also purportedly increases battery life by 56 minutes and leaves an average of 1.5GB of memory for purposes other than running the OS.
Unlike previous iterations of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps. Huawei maintains top Chinese outfits aren't deterred by that. It cited Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com as among those who have developed native apps for the OS. In case you're not familiar, they're China's top shopping, payment, and social media apps.
Huawei also claimed that at the time of its announcement, over 15,000 HarmonyOS native applications and meta-services were also launched. That's a nice number, but well short of the millions of apps found on the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store. The Chinese tech player also revealed that the operating system has 110 million lines of code and claimed it improves the overall performance of mobile devices running it by 30 percent. It also purportedly increases battery life by 56 minutes and leaves an average of 1.5GB of memory for purposes other than running the OS.
Re: Command economies make this easy... (Score:2)
Africa, south east asia, latam and less affluent peoplein the middle east are prime candidates for harmonyOS. More so if other manufacuters adopt it as a low cost smartphone platform. Think of it as KaiOS++
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I'm reasonably sure they wouldn't have bothered if the USA's government hadn't COMMANDED that US companies stop supplying and otherwise dealing with companies from China. So, you have it wrong about which government is the one COMMANDING things like this.
Also, "I'm sure" doesn't count for much when you're from a country that has a media with such entrenched propaganda spreading lies.
hahaha, the "millions of apps" on play store (Score:1)
99.9999% them are shit in the hopes of making a dime
number of available apps means nothing
Re: hahaha, the "millions of apps" on play store (Score:2)
My thoughts as well. Or many apps posted by IT or software developer students as part of their Android experimentation.
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My thoughts as well. Or many apps posted by IT or software developer students as part of their Android experimentation.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of apps on Android, iOS, HarmonyOS, etc. How many are commercial, how many are useful free apps, how many are ad-supported, and how many are totally useless garbage. If the distributions are similar, then comparing total app population counts would still be somewhat useful.
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I came here to say the same thing. I'd rather have a few thousand or even just a few hundred really good apps of various types than millions of shitty apps. I don't need 10,000 ways to do the same thing poorly. Just one good way would be great.
I went through a dozen calculators before I found one wor keeping. Having 11 shitty ones available only wasted my time.
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Re: hahaha, the "millions of apps" on play store (Score:2)
Smart developers avoid that problem byusing tauri
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Smart developers avoid that problem byusing tauri
The problem is that few restaurants and retail stores are hiring smart developers, because ultimately, nobody cares. Zero of those customers have made any requirements regarding storage or bandwidth use.
When developers care, we get things that are like Stuxnet, which managed to worm itself into an airgapped network, hide itself from discovery, look for specific network-connected hardware, exploit THAT hardware's vulnerabilities to alter its functionality, search for the monitoring software and MITM the outp
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How about a few hundred shitty apps? Worst of both worlds!
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I'd pay extra for that! Think of how much time I'd save by spending it on something more useful than my phone!
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But you want them for free. ...
With no adds
So?
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50,000 flashlight apps that mine crypto or serve lock screen ads every 30 seconds.
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It means more than saying 15,000 apps. Since most of those are almost certainly just wrappers around the website with no real functionality. Or Huawei has slapped in a compatibility layer or it still contains big chunks of Android that they're not mentioning to make some apps work.
And obviously millions of apps is meaningless in itself since nobody will install them all. But it signifies the health and maturity of the store and is indicative of the diversity of apps available.
It's the apps, stupid... (Score:3)
In the late 2000s, we had Symbian, Windows Mobile, PalmOS, iPhone OS (was before it was named iOS), Android, and BlackberryOS. Why did Android and iOS survive when everything else fell to the wayside, even when Microsoft tried again with a mobile OS (which was pretty solid)? The app makers. Yes, there are ~6 million supposedly signed up, but even though China is a vast market, it isn't the world. Companies with a presence elsewhere that the Chinese government doesn't like are not going to bother, so one someone steps outside of the Sino-based ecosystem, it will be a vast wasteland.
For a lot of markets that are suspicious about a closed source OS with a proprietary kernel, which means a lot of Asia, Europe, North America, and maybe even Russia, there is not going to be much momentum to develop on the OS. Especially when all your friends are on one app, and that app isn't available on the OS.
It will be interesting to see how HarmonyOS fares. Were it not for geopolitics, it probably would have been tossed for a fork of AOSP, or maybe even a fork of QNX, ages ago.
Re:It's the apps, stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows Mobile was a PDA OS that just never evolved into a phone OS, it required a pen or sharp fingernails. It was however the best mobile development experience for over a decade.
Windows Phone failed because Ballmer was a total moron. The moment he and Elop came out on stage wearing suits with sweat stained arm pit and geeked out on how cool Windows phone is, they guaranteed that no one with a sense of fashion would go near it. But what really killed it was that C# was the only way to program for the phone. Sure, Unity is C# friendly, but every app would have to be entirely rewritten for Windows phone. This would have potentially made Windows phone the most secure ever, but no one is ever going to invest in fully rewriting everything for a single platform. So the app store was nothing but porn and gambling.
Palm was a PDA OS, it was never anything else. Actually, PalmOS never even evolved to PDA, it was a PIM OS.
BlackBerry failed for many reasons. Mostly, they ignored the world market. They just didn't exist anywhere outside of the US and Canada. China, Russia, Africa, South America, the middle east and more are a huge market which Huawei will succeed in. BlackBerry was only available to a very small number of people. I never saw a Blackberry outside of the lab or on TV. Another major fail was selling it as a secure device. It wasn't.
Apple succeeded almost entirely because they're a fashion brand that makes tech. Oh, and releasing the first generally available multitouch phone with a fast CPU, lots of RAM and a web browser that was actually useable helped. And... it worked with iTunes. Nokia, the closest competitor at the time had the crappiest music experience imaginable. They couldn't even make a decent music store in Finland.
Android worked because it was the only commercially supported OS basically free for use on any phone (initially) so vendors LOVED. Google made their money from the customer. Of course, it's a crap deal for the phone maker since Google gets all the reoccurring income... Which is HUGE. But Google and Microsoft were the only companies that could ever have competed against Apple and Ballmer screwed that up on an unimaginable scale.
Huawei will compete in some markets without a problem. They will need to hire massive numbers of developers in Kenya to truly compete. This is due to English fluency. The HarmonyOS is currently poorly documented in English. Kenya is the only non-NATO country with decent English skills. So, making Kenya a major development hub for Harmony would be brilliant.
Re:It's the apps, stupid... (Score:5, Informative)
Former Palm employee here. I worked on PalmOS devices but also Windows Mobile devices 20y ago.
At the time I actually liked my PalmOS based Treo but it was terrible at multitasking, browsing the early web (browser crashed a lot), or with audio, while video was pretty much non existent. PalmOS was great for its time when it came out but it failed to transition to something better when CPU, RAM and storage became more usable. The OS did try to go to multitasking but that version was never picked up by the hardware vendors.
When PalmOne (hardware fork of Palm, later rebranded just Palm), went for multitasking they tried Windows Mobile. That thing was a pile of crap. Microsoft pretty much tried to cram Windows into smaller hardware with touchscreen and the usability was awful, even for Desktop Windows users.
There were other issues, such as the tight control on the phone hardware that the carriers had. Palm had to get all the hardware designs approved by the carriers, as customers only bought their phones from the carriers and were not used to bring their own device. Steve Job pretty much forced AT&T to accept the iPhone as-is, without a physical keyboard which helped with the success. Palm had proposed and shown larger screen prototypes with no keyboards, all were rejected by the carriers.
Palm eventually ditched everything to try WebOS, but that was too little, too late, and before running everything as JavaScript was really viable on mobile hardware (I still think it is a poor choice for desktop/laptop apps).
There is room for more than two OS players. We now have Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Linux variants for laptops. Three-ish platforms for game consoles.
The Chinese market is large enough to be self sufficient, and well, this is not a free market anyways, so the market is pretty much what the party allows. My guess is that we will start seeing more cheap devices in the upcoming years. They will likely be full of spyware and backdoors with many quality issues, but when things are cheap enough they'll find buyers.
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This! To sell a phone, all mobile manufacturer was almost fully dependent on the mobile carrier.
Remember that you did not direclty buy a phone, you bought a overpriced mobile subscription that included a phone.
I remember implementing mobile carrier demands, while thinking, no user wants this.
Then Apple did a computer that could also call, which had finger touch screen and nothing was the same again.
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The market is a free market.
No idea where you get your nonsense from.
A Chinese company does not need any approval from the Party, if it sells stuff that follows legislations.
Stupid Americans.
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Microsoft's Windows Phone on the other hand was had two entirely separate versions: Windows Phone 7 - just an UI layer on top of Windows Mobile, hardcoded for 480x800px screens, and Windows Phone 8 - a new kernel, a new graph
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Regarding English skills, you are missing India, Sri Lanka, Belize and the obvious Elephant: China.
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India may have alot of English literate people, but India has it's own problems with China, and has banned tik tok and a bunch of other China apps within it's app stores, not to mention they don't even allow direct flights between India and China.
Not sure how willing Indians will be willing to work with Huawei / HarmonyOS. Especially since I think India has even banned some phones from China (maybe that was a rumour, not too sure on that currently).
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> It required rewriting
Rewriting? It was the biggest platform, so that is what it was written for. If you don't know how it works, then that's on you.
Re: It's the apps, stupid... (Score:2)
Both the kernel and userland of harmonyOS are FOSS.
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It is not the OSes that fail, but the companies and their products.
For example, Black berry was considered to use encrypted communication between two Black berries.
When it turned out that the NSA, or CIA is spying on the German Chancellor, who used a Black berry, it basically was the death of the company. And a major disruption in the German - American relationships.
I have a friend who is a Microsoft "sys admin". He used to have one of the earliest " Windows " phones. I think the OS was a variation of Windo
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Symbian, Windows Mobile and PalmOS all had apps. Now, Symbian apps were kinda strange, but they existed but often with compatibility caveats (works on this device, but not that device, and so on).
But Windows Mobile and Pa
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So what? This is primarily for China, not the rest of the world.
The US government has forced them into this and they have done it. It really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
The apps aren't so important in China since they have 'super apps' which use web technologies that work everywhere...there aren't many apps that NEED to be native. It's the equivalent of PWAs, which are native to a web browser, except these are native to WeChat (or whatever engine they embedded). Huawei have their own "PWA", called Qui
1.5gb for spyware (Score:1)
"leaves an average of 1.5GB of memory for purposes other than running the OS"
Like gov backed spyware???
Re:1.5gb for spyware (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah I hate it when Huawei spys on me, but don't mind when the US Gov, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta... do.
How will it change? (Score:2)
I do wonder if these will fundamentally be different OS's or just track each other forever.
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My impression is that it's a much more fundamental OS than the others - it brings devices together and makes them interoperate more easily.
Gee, looks like iOS (Score:1)
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It doesn't surprise me that you would presume such a thing - it shows how little you know and how effective your bias is affecting your views.
Will this be true outside of China? (Score:3)
There were some rumors that HarmonyOS would only be available in China. However, about 70% of Huawei phone sales are outside of China (almost all in Asia). So, do phone users care about no Android support, both in China and the rest of Asia?
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It will launch in China, which is very bad news for Google because despite being banned in China it is a huge market for Android. Most Chinese phones run a de-googled version of Android with local app stores and services, and the benefit to Google is that there are a lot of developers familiar with their OS and a lot of apps that can also run on Android.
Even worse, over time it may spread beyond China. Overseas customers are already used to Huawei devices not having Google services or the Play Store, but se
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Huwai does not sell much phones in Thailand.
Android is important for typical Asian apps, like banking, LINE, ALIBABA, WeChat, Shopee, Temux, Bolt, Grab, Gap, TikTok and hundred mores.
They won't sell phones if people can not use them.
99% of my payments I do with my phone app. 99% of my communication is with LINE.
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Even now, the OS put on phones sold outside China is not the same as sold inside China.
China is accustomed to few apps (Score:3)
Almost every popular Chinese app is an "everything app" or strives to be one. The only pure internet browser is Edge. There's Chrome but it's been so inundated with negative reviews nobody downloads it. But even Edge is dwarfed by domestic "web browser" apps like Baidu and 360 that have short videos, shopping, movies, travel booking all rolled into them.
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Huawei has their own "pure browser", called "Browser", so Edge isn't the only one. There's also some from outside China that work well, like Firefox. Chrome doesn't work "properly" without GMS (despite working "just fine" on desktop), so it is a waste of time.
So, "Almost" - hrm...I think that's an exaggeration, but fair enough. The major one is WeChat, follow up by AliPay. IINM, they both have embedded browsers (based on Chromium?) and that drives their 3rd part apps. It's a bit like PWAs, imo. Not many "ap
It's a fork (Score:3, Insightful)
So they forked AOSP and broke backward compatibility. This is somehow impressive to people?
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Impressive? It was forced on them, and people thought they couldn't free themselves from US OSes...so, yeah, it's impressive.
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If one considers the amount of resources thrown at it, and if privacy from government intrusion at any level is a priority, HarmonyOS is significantly less impressive than HaikuOS or any hobby level OS.
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China is not communist. I stopped reading at that point since it is surely followed by bigoted drivel.
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China's only had 1 political party, unchanged since 1949. Can you guess what it is?
Put the dunce cap back on, dwater. [wikipedia.org]
Compromised by design (Score:2)
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funny that, I don't trust any of them. the US stuff is probably riddled with US TLA agencies backdoors
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Much like Android then ?
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It's worth my mentioning I don't have or ever want a smartphone at all. I have a $40 clamshell phone that has no internet access or ability to load apps of any kind. True, it runs a very stripped-down version of Android, but between the inability to have anything loaded on it, the lack of memory or CPU power, and the fact that it's either turned off or in 'airplane' mode most of the time, except when I'm actively using it, I can't see how 'compromised' it could ever be.
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Guaranteed you're simply a bigot.
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China only (Score:2)
If the internal Chinese market is enough for Huawei, then more power to them. But don't expect an OS that can't run popular apps to sell much outside their country. Which is a shame, as Huawei used to make good hardware (my old P20 still works fine as a backup phone).
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blame the US for the stupid sanctions. they did this
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They still do make good hardware.
Don't write them off. They can use the Chinese market to grow, much like the other OSes did. They don't have the baggage of Google Android or Apple's whatever-they-call-it-now.
Anyone remembers Bada OS? (Score:2)
Nevertheless, I used Samsung S8500 and it had insane battery life and performance. Bada supported both Linux and BSD kernels, for high and low performance devices respectively, via the same ABI.
Even though not exactly the same, it seems that history is going to repeat itself.
I, for one, cheer on the idea of alternative to Android and iOS.
Not Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I had assumed HarmonyOS was based on Linux, in the sense Android and Tizen are. But looks like they've gone and made their own OS from the ground up. With even a variant analogous to WearOS, and their own programming language too. Bold move...
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> I had assumed HarmonyOS was based on Linux
It was, but it isn't any more.