Huawei is moving to its own OS, completely independent of Android

Huawei has officially announced HarmonyOS Next, which is developed without using Android components. The new operating system will be used on Huawei devices in China, but a global release was previously confirmed, GSMArena reports.

Image source: Huawei

HarmonyOS Next is designed for a wide range of devices, from smartphones and wearables to smart home and car systems. The OS uses a proprietary microkernel based on the OpenHarmony open source code, supports applications via the Huawei Ark compiler with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), and a seamless unified architecture between HarmonyOS Next devices, the cloud, and various form factors.

Image source: Huawei

Chairman of Huawei Consumer BG Richard Yu said that at the moment there are already 15,000 applications and services in the ecosystem, and their number will grow in the near future. According to him, previous versions of HarmonyOS are already installed on more than a billion devices worldwide, including smartphones, tablets, wearable devices and car infotainment systems.

The operating system has received an updated design, new options for customizing the lock screen and home screen, a redesigned control center, faster animation and application launch. Implemented impressive AI features based on Pangu’s large language model. Huawei was also able to achieve a 30% improvement in device smoothness and a 20% reduction in power consumption when interacting between software modules.

Image source: Huawei

Share 2.0 enables seamless connection and file sharing between devices, and Huawei says transferring a 1.2GB file between two HarmonyOS Next devices will take just 8 seconds. To ensure security, HarmonyOS Next uses its own Star Shield architecture with system-level protection. The public beta version has already been distributed in China. The list of supported devices includes the Pura 70 series, Huawei Pocket 2 and MatePad Pro 11 (2024).