Beijing: Announcing the latest version of HarmonyOS, Huawei on Thursday said that smartphones with its indigenously built operating system can be expected next year.
HarmonyOS 2.0
HarmonyOS 2.0, the new version of the operating system, brings a comprehensive upgrade to its existing distributed capabilities, including software bus, data management, and security, Huawei said at its developer conference in Shenzhen, China.
With the latest update, HarmonyOS will officially be open-source and developers will be able to gain access to emulators, SDK ((software development kit) packages, and IDE (integrated development environment) tools.
Open-Source Project
The open-source project will be launched in stages with a mobile HarmonyOS beta release planned firstly for Chinese developers at the end of this year.
“Starting on 10 September, HarmonyOS is open to 128KB-128MB IoT devices, such as smart TVs, wearables, cars, and more,” Richard Yu, Executive Director and CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, said in his keynote speech.
“In April 2021, we will open it to 128MB-4GB devices and in October 2021, HarmonyOS will be opened for devices above 4GB,” Yu said.
Huawei, which became the largest smartphone seller in the world in the second quarter of this year according to a report from Canalys, officially launched HarmonyOS last year.
Major chips and technologies from the US have not been available to the company since May 16, 2019 due to restrictions imposed by the Donald Trump administration amid trade war between US and China.
Huawei’s consumer businesses faced a tough time due to inability to use Google’s ecosystem in overseas markets.
The US on August 17 this year tightened its restrictions so that Huawei cannot get access chips made with US technology.
With the support of more 1.8 million registered developers worldwide, AppGallery and the HMS ecosystem has continued to show progress this year.
AppGallery
AppGallery currently has over 96,000 apps integrated with HMS Core and more than 490 million global active users.
In addition, it also achieved a record 261 billion app downloads and distributions between January and August 2020, the company said.