As expected, Huawei has announced HarmonyOS NEXT, its Android-free operating system. HarmonyOS NEXT was announced during an event in China. Huawei wants to transfer its devices to its in-built OS following US sanctions.
HarmonyOS NEXT has finally been properly announced by Huawei
Do note that HarmonyOS NEXT will first roll out to devices in China, though a global launch is expected. Huawei did not talk about the global launch during the event, but a company exec did confirm, a while back, that it’s coming to global markets too.
With that being said, HarmonyOS is using Huawei’s self-developed microkernel which is based on the OpenHarmony open-source code. It supports applications via the Huawei Ark compiler and with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).
This setup means that HarmonyOS NEXT devices should be compatible on basically every level. A unified architecture will be in place, and this OS is not reserved only for smartphones, not at all. It’s coming to a ton of Huawei products, including watches, tablets, and more.
Over 15,000 apps are currently available for Huawei’s proprietary OS
Huawei Consumer Business Group Chairman, Richard Yu, said that 15,000 apps and servies are now a part of the HarmonyOS NEXT ecosystem. More are coming constantly. He also confirmed that HarmonyOS is now running on over 1 billion devices, globally.
HarmonyOS NEXT does not exactly look identical to HarmonyOS. Huawei did refresh some parts of the UI, such as the lockscreen. It looks much flatter now and delivers new customization options. Something similar can be said for the home screen, as you can see in the gallery below.
There are a number of visual changes included here
The company also redesigned the control center, improved app launch speeds, and sped up the animations. A ton of AI-based features are also included in the package, though it remains to be seen which ones remain in the global version.
The UI running on HarmonyOS NEXT is called HarmonyOS NEXT 5 UI. Huawei also said that it managed to increase device fluency by 30%, and lower the power consumption by 20%. The company also says that tranferring a file between devices by using Huawei Share 2.0 is really fast. It takes only 8 seconds for a 1.2GB file.
Huawei also developed an entirely new security system. It’s called ‘Star Shield’, and this new architecture offers system-level protection for HarmonyOS NEXT devices.
A public beta version is available
A public beta version of HarmonyOS NEXT is now available for users in China. It’s available for the Huawei Pura 70 series, Huawei Pocket 2, and Huawei MatePad Pro 11 (2024). As mentioned earlier, there’s still no word on the global launch of HarmonyOS NEXT. We presume it will take Huawei quite some time to make that happen due to app support. Things are considerably different in China.