Following the announcement of its first 2021 foldable, Huawei confirmed that its personal working system, HarmonyOS, would formally be coming to smartphones beginning in April this yr.
The 30-minute 22 February occasion stream noticed Huawei Client BG CEO, Richard Yu, present an replace on the state of the corporate’s cellular enterprise, earlier than introducing its latest smartphone – the Huawei Mate X2 – ending the deal with with phrase that HarmonyOS would lastly be arriving on Huawei’s smartphones within the coming months.
As a platform, the HarmonyOS 2.0 beta – full with smartphone assist – was made obtainable in December 2020, with the corporate promising {that a} full launch of the brand new working system would arrive on its smartphones someday in 2021.
Whereas no particular date was talked about throughout this newest announcement, Yu proclaimed that “Huawei flagship telephone customers will be capable of improve their telephones to HarmonyOS ranging from this April,” happening to substantiate that the newly-launched Mate X2 could be the primary telephone to assist the working system, when it releases.
At the moment, the Mate X2 is cited as operating EMUI 11 operating atop Android 10 on Huawei’s web site, however whereas the corporate has billed HarmonyOS as its personal platform, a deep-dive into the Concord OS 2.0 beta and its improvement instruments, carried out by Ars Technica in early February, revealed that regardless of the advertising and marketing converse, HarmonyOS was basically open-source Android 10 with some liberal rebranding.
Early testing has steered that there is little distinction, past the substitution of the Android title with HarmonyOS’ – no less than within the platform’s present guise – and that differentiating options will not seemingly manifest till future releases roll out.
Huawei has gone on file to say that it hopes some 200 million units will likely be operating on HarmonyOS 2.0 earlier than the yr’s finish. We’re simply left questioning what number of of these will likely be obtainable exterior of China and what advantages the transfer from Android to HarmonyOS presents contemplating the present state of the platform.
