Huawei’s HarmonyOS officially announced

Huawei has unveiled its own operating system, HarmonyOS, in the Huawei Developer’s Conference, currently taking place in China.

CEO of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, Richard Yu, introduced the HarmonyOS to the audience in the conference. He explained Huawei’s reasoning behind developing their own OS, stating that:

“We’re entering a day and age where people expect a holistic intelligent experience across all devices and scenarios. To support this, we felt it was important to have an operating system with improved cross-platform capabilities. We needed an OS that supports all scenarios, that can be used across a broad range of devices and platforms, and that can meet consumer demand for low latency and strong security.”

HarmonyOS is described as a “microkernel-based distributed OS that delivers smooth experience across all scenarios.” Yu also explained the meaning behind the name, choosing the word harmony as it is the closest to the Chinese name of the OS, HongmengOS. He stated that Huawei aims to “bring harmony and convenience to the world.”

The operating system has four distinct technical features, namely:

• Seamless experience across devices
• Smooth performance due to deterministic latency engine and high-performance IPC
• Secure microkernel architecture
• Multi-device IDE that allows apps to be developed only once and deployed across multiple devices.

Yu also introduced the HUAWEI ARK Compiler that allows developers to compile numerous languages into a unified environment.

Huawei announced that HarmonyOS 1.0 will be first adopted in its smart screen products to launch later this year. The operating system will then be adopted across other devices eventually, such as smart devices, wearables, Huawei Vision, and head units.

Huawei also stated that the HarmonyOS is open source and that it is readily deployable for smartphones.