The Huawei Developer Conference officially kicked off today, and with it brought the introduction of HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS is Huawei's custom operating system. The company touts that HarmonyOS is a "microkernel-based, distributed OS for all scenarios" that's meant to offer a smooth, cohesive user experience across all devices. Huawei touts that HarmonyOS can be used on devices like smartphones, in-car head units, smart speakers, smartwatches, and more.
Detailed during the HDC keynote today, HarmonyOS is open source, and its IDE lets developers create apps once and deploy it on multiple different devices. The Huawei ARK Compiler will support unified compilation in multiple languages, including C/C++, Java, JS, and Kotlin. Huawei also says that HarmonyOS will not allow root privilege in order to provide better security.
HarmonyOS will launch first on smart screen devices that will arrive later this year. Over the next three years, Huawei plans to optimize and improve HarmonyOS and bring it to more devices, including wearables and in-car head units.
When it comes to smartphones, Huawei CEO Richard Yu has said that his company could use HarmonyOS on smartphones at any time and that it could migrate from Android to HarmonyOS in as quickly as one to two days. Huawei plans to stick with Android on smartphones for now, though, out of consideration for partners and a better ecosystem.
Huawei says that HarmonyOS will be available first in China, but that it will expand to the global ecosystem.