This is really meant for just the Chinese domestic market, and of very little interest to the RoW. For the Chinese this is a relatively small leap. The Chinese internet has always been it's own separate world, with very little dependence on the US tech giants. Google and Meta have been banned for over a decade, and for almost any significant digital service where the RoW depends on US software/service providers there are large Chinese substitutes.
Although most phone makers still rely on Android, Google Play Store and Play Services are banned in China, so for the domestic market they've always been running AOSP plus domestic middleware. Huawei is now substituting the remaining dependency on AOSP, but the open sourced base layer is really not the valuable part of Android.
The most interesting part is that it is based on realtime LiteOS that was build long time ago for IoT applications. It's not a time-sharing OS like AOSP is.
From a quick glance it looks like they are setting up for people to write apps for this specific OS. Surprised, thought they would try and be android app compatible.
The Mate 70 is shipping with it… as indicated in the article?
Obviously wiki pages are not 100% always up to date or even correct, which you should know considering you’ve been on the internet for at least seven years…
I'd love some good technical western coverage of OpenAtom's OpenHarmony or Huaweii's hard fork & rebuild Harmony NEXT.
In particular, they claim a distributed bus DSoftBus underneath, that allows very seamless inter-dice operation. An example use case from one of the few docs online talks about example use cases of videoconferencing using multiple devices... I've done similar with scrcpy on Android & felt like a small demi-gos. But ambient capabilities seem perhaps just part of the OS here, & apps can allegedly easily move between devices & tap a network of resources.
The world is sleeping hard on this. Would be so good to know more to have visibility into these very interesting creations. (Feels very Webinos to me, which was more an iot os & protocols than consumer os, but interesting at pooling distributed resources across networks).
Truely the promise of the age of the internet has arrived: our choice is between an increasingly closed source android developed under the watchful and loving gaze of the worlds largest advertising firm or a totally closed source HarmonyOS developed under the watchful and loving gaze of the Chinese government.
If this means there are three major mobile OS players rather than two, I'm happy. Google keeps shoehorning crap and dark patterns (break unrelated functionality if you don't have ___location turned on, break functionality unnecessarily if history is turned off) into their products and I'm sick of it. They need serious competition on their own handsets.
HarmonyOS is built upon open-source OpenHarmony (which seems to have many variants, not sure all of them are open), and OpenHarmony runs on Linux / HongMeng kernel (see OSDI '24 paper for the latter, code not open yet)
Huweii's Harmony NEXT came about shortly after OpenAtom formed, which is sort of the Linux Foundation of Harmony. NEXT definitely has a lot of new & rebuilt aspects of Harmony, seems unlikely to be compatible or really the same; it's a major shift with new kernels & all.
The OS compatible with Android apps is HarmonyOS (<5.0), which you can literally think of as Android + some (maybe much) Huawei stuff. The thing based on OpenHarmony is sometimes referred to as HarmonyOS Next / 5.0, and some of those having upgraded to HMOS 5.0 are always complaining its compatibility in Chinese communities.
Huawei always invents so many names so that people often confuse them.
Reliable systems can be built from unreliable components. The more competition there is the more chances that one of the options turns out to be good or - even better - is forced to be.
Or an even more closed source os by a fruit company that keeps all your data on servers under Chinese government control. And fully cooperates with russian government (pays fines, blocks apps) despite claims that they have left the market
Just to post a second reply to say that it would be really nice if anyone who wants to go into programming HAS to do a lot of low level programming like people between 7x-9x. I don't really get the chance to program tools in my work. It's going to be super stupid and a big no-no if one wants to do some lower level programming in a higher level job. That's why I would love the chance.
You probably would ask "Sure why not do it at your free time"? Well would love to but right now with family and work and a bit of mental issues (difficult to focus) it's really tough for me to do it after 10pm. Plus the free time I get is scattered among hours, not in a big chunk.
Although most phone makers still rely on Android, Google Play Store and Play Services are banned in China, so for the domestic market they've always been running AOSP plus domestic middleware. Huawei is now substituting the remaining dependency on AOSP, but the open sourced base layer is really not the valuable part of Android.