Huawei has kept Westerners away from the first HarmonyOS beta for smartphones. To access it, in fact, an ArsTechnica reporter had to pretend to be a developer, send the passport to Huawei and wait for a two-day approval to get his hands on the development environment of what should be Huawei's future operating system.
Once you got everything, it took very little to understand that in the end HarmonyOS is Android 10 . Huawei has done nothing but take the builds without Google Mobile Services that were already distributed with the most recent smartphones and replaced the word "Android" in the code with the word "HarmonyOS" .
It partially succeeded, because most of the modules still respond as if they were Android, and the same goes for a lot of apps and extensions. Huawei could do it, Android is OpenSource, and it did.
We talked a lot about HarmonyOS, obviously based on the documentation provided by Huawei, but if on the one hand the opensource version for devices with little memory is available for download and can already be used today, the "beta" version for smartphones has been "armored" ”From Huawei as if there was something to hide .
The thing to hide is evidently the fact that in the end HarmonyOS on smartphone was a quick, convenient solution to show that Harmony was almost ready. A "beta" that is not a beta, because in the end it is stable Android with the stable EMUI, there is very little beta.
Although some may be surprised by this, we do not find anything strange, quite the contrary. When Richard Yu presented HarmonyOS in 2019, he showed a detailed roadmap that included the launch of Harmony on many devices but excluding smartphones . The roadmap reached 2022 and included TVs, wearables, IoT devices and other types of products, but no smartphones, because today making an operating system for smartphones requires not only a lot of time but also a huge number of certifications for wireless network modules . iOS and Android are the result of tens of years of work, tests, experiments, and in recent years millions of bugs have been closed, even very serious ones.
Huawei's roadmap is absolutely intelligent and designed precisely for gradual development: the OpenSource version of HarmonyOS, the one that reflects the already advertised principles of microkernel, distributed bus and virtual peripherals, runs on devices with very little memory (32 MB) and only with a couple of development boards. Anyone can download it, and you can see that it is actually an operating system built from scratch and that it took years of work anyway .
Bringing this version to a smartphone, if we calculate the thousands of things a smartphone has to do, would certainly take more years of work. Not a couple, much more: in 2019, when HarmonyOS was launched, no predictions were made for smartphones.
HarmonyOS is not a "fake" operating system: HarmonyOS continues its development, as can be seen from the very active Gitee repository (the Chinese Github). However, it is not made for smartphones. While the work for the true Harmony continues, the Huawei developers continue the development of the Huawei Mobile Services and the EMUI, which in the end is the graphic link between the services and the one below. And underneath it is still Android, because today there is no alternative for Huawei. And it won't even exist in the near future.
Update: Huawei released the following statement:
Built on Huawei's distributed technology, HarmonyOS is a totally new operating system uniquely designed around the needs of a future where iOT devices are designed to coexist and interact massively. It can be deployed on demand to a wide variety of devices, and flexibly adapt to different hardware resources and application requirements. While ensuring that all applicable open-source rules are strictly adhered to, HarmonyOS leverages a large number of third-party open-source resources, including Linux, to accelerate the development of a complete architecture. By drawing on the open source code of AOSP (Android Open Source Project), the HarmonyOS distributed application framework can coexist with the AOSP application framework and support both the AOSP and HarmonyOS APIs to offer users the same smartphone and tablet experience as before and the cross multi-device differential experiences. While some elements of the EMUI 11 user interface are retained in the current developer beta, HarmonyOS will launch with a new user interface alongside upcoming Huawei smartphones. The developer beta program is still ongoing, and we are delighted to receive any feedback from the developers and partners who work alongside us to bring our vision of all scenarios to life.