- The Honor Vision TV will be Huawei’s first HarmonyOS device
- The company, however, intends to continue using Android for the time being.
- The OS will be released as an open-source platform worldwide to encourage adoption.
Huawei has put an end to the rumours on developing its own operating system to replace its reliance on Google’s Android.
The Chinese tech giant has officially announced its new operating system, called HarmonyOS. In China, the software will be known as Hongmeng.
The company said that the operating system, a microkernel-based distributed OS, can be used in everything from smartphones to smart speakers, wearables and in-vehicle systems to create a shared ecosystem across devices.
But for now, Huawei plans to focus on “smart screens.” According to reports, the first HarmonyOS-powered devices will be a pair of smart TVs called the Honor Vision and Honor Vision Pro, which will go on sale in China next week.
The company also plans to release the operating system as an open-source platform worldwide to encourage adoption.
Will it replace Android?
HarmonyOS is part of Huawei’s efforts to decrease its reliance on Google’s Android operating system. Google suspended the company’s Android license back in May, following the US government’s decision to put Huawei on the Entity List.
Although the company has indicated that the OS is ready to run on phones, it said that it plans to continue using Android for its own smartphones for the time being.
“Because we support Google’s Android ecosystem, we will prioritize Android for smartphones. If we can’t use Android, we can install HarmonyOS quickly,” Yu said at Huawei’s developers conference in Dongguan.
Yu also pointed out that HarmonyOS is “completely different from Android and iOS” because of its ability to scale across different kinds of devices.
With inputs from The Verge
