Huawei's Android Substitute HarmonyOS 2.0 – Smartphone Beta Version Available by December

Technology Author: Beier Kan, Ivan Platonov Editor: Luke Sheehan Sep 10, 2020 07:50 PM (GMT+8)

As the foremost news released in the Huawei Developer Conference 2020, HarmonyOS 2.0, which is one of the company's counter-plans of the US sanctions, will be applicable for Huawei smartphones, watches and tablets by December 2020.

Image credit: Huawei

According to Huawei, Harmony OS 2.0, the second edition of its self-developed operating system, will be fully open-sourced in December 2020, with the software development kit (SDK) for smartphones becoming available globally. The versions for TV sets, wearables and smart cars have already been made public. The company revealed its internally built operating system in 2019 amid the intensifying Sino-American tech standoff.

The HarmonyOS upgrade in August 2020 brought up a more completed developer environment and the distributed capacity for connected devices, which could further empower applications in collaborative office, online education, and so on. Huawei says that, from today, the open-source project will support devices with 128KB to 128MB of RAM, while it's aiming to open up to devices with more RAM by April 2021 and October 2021.

As the core business of Huawei's consumer business, its smartphone has been challenged by the US sanctions on both hardware components and software from Google. With the Beta version for app developers available in December this year and the massive application on smartphones in 2021, the company's smartphone business is moving promisingly towards a self-sufficient and risk-resilient ecosystem.