Huawei announces HarmonyOS Next – the new version of its Android rival

Huawei just ushered in a new page in its history with the official launch of HarmonyOS Next. This marks Huawei’s first operating system built independently of Android and the Linux kernel as it aims to transition its devices to an entirely in-house OS.

HarmonyOS Next is set to power the current and future generations of Huawei devices in China for now, though a global release was confirmed previously. It will work across a broad range of devices ranging from smartphones to wearables, smart home devices and car cockpits.

HarmonyOS Next uses a self-developed microkernel based on the OpenHarmony open-source core. It supports apps via the Huawei Ark compiler with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and promises a seamless unified architecture between HarmonyOS Next devices, the cloud as well as interconnectivity across various device form factors.

Huawei Consumer Business Group Chairman, Richard Yu announced that 15,000 apps and services are now part of the HarmonyOS Next ecosystem with more on the way. We also learned that the previous versions of HarmonyOS are currently running on over 1 billion devices globally. This figure includes smartphones, tablets, smart wearables, smart home and car infotainment systems.

HarmonyOS Next comes with a refreshed visual identity with new lockscreen and home screen customization options, redesigned control center, faster animations, and app launch speeds. There are impressive AI features on deck which are powered by system-level AI based on the Pangu large language model.

Huawei also managed to achieve a 30% increase in device fluency and 20% lower power consumption in communication between software modules. Huawei Share 2.0 promises seamless connection and file sharing between devices – Huawei says you can transfer a 1.2GB file between two HarmonyOS Next devices in just 8 seconds.

For security, HarmonyOS Next brings a self-developed Star Shield architecture with system-level protection.

Huawei is seeding a public beta version of HarmonyOS Next to users in China. The supported device list includes the Pura 70 series, Huawei Pocket 2 and MatePad Pro 11 (2024).

Source (in Chinese)