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With Harmony OS, Huawei wants to end reliance on Android

Harmony OS is the latest offering by the Chinese tech giant Huawei. This OS will work across all digital devices and will be launched later in 2019.

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PCQ Bureau
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Harmony OS

After ending in a rough battle with the US administration over Android license dispute, the Chinese smartphone maker has officially announced its own first-party operating system – Harmony OS – at its annual developers’ conference in China. In China, it is called Hongmeng OS.

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With Harmony OS, Huawei wants to end its reliance on Android, but it still has a long way to go forward. According to Huawei, Harmony OS a microkernel-based distributed OS, which will be used for everything from smartwatches to smart screens to in-vehicle systems in order to create a shared ecosystem across devices. Huawei has made the operating system open-source to encourage adoption among web developers. While Huawei doesn’t reveal much about its ‘smart screen’ device, however, its sub-brand Honor is expected to bring the OS to a smart TV.

Further, at the developers’ conference, Huawei said that Harmony OS utilizes distributed architecture and distributed virtual bus technology. Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu at the conference claimed that HarmonyOS is entirely different from Android and iOS, owing to its capability to function and scale across different kinds of devices. App developers can build your app once and then deploy them across a range of different devices.

Harmony OS allows app developers to focus on their own individual service logic instead of dealing with the underlying technology for distributed apps. The company has also added a ‘Deterministic Latency Engine’ to address slow performance challenges, and a high-performance ‘Inter-Process Communication (IPC).’

While Harmony OS sounds promising, but when it comes to a larger picture, it’s going to be a tough challenge for Huawei to create an app ecosystem to rival both Android and Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

According to Huawei, Harmony OS 1.0 will be first introduced in the company’s smart screen products, that will be launched later in 2019.

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