HDC 2019: Huawei Introduces HarmonyOS

HDC 2019: Huawei Introduces HarmonyOS

HDC 2019: Huawei Introduces HarmonyOS - During the 2019 Huawei Developer Conference, which was held in Dongguan, China, Huawei announced their operating system called HarmonyOS. This OS is designed with a focus on flexibility of use, which is ready to be used for various scenarios. One interesting thing, this OS which is also known as "Hongmeng" will be used by Huawei devices after this announcement.

Used on a Smartphone?

Feeling that this question will be asked a lot, Richard Yu, CEO of the Huawei Consumer Business Group immediately explained that at this time they would not use this OS on their smartphones. Android will still be used by Huawei, mainly because they are still working with Google. So, smartphone devices that will be released by Huawei in the future will continue to use Android, and even in the HarmonyOS roadmap until 2022, there are no plans for Huawei to use this OS for smartphones.

However, one thing also explained by Richard Yu, does not mean that HarmonyOS cannot be used on smartphones. This OS design allows use for a variety of devices, including smartphones, so that when needed, they can quickly use the OS for their smartphones. Even so, for now, HarmonyOS 1.0 is only used for smart screen devices, as well as smart wearable and HUD for cars in the next 1-2 years.

HarmonyOS: A Similar Experience on Many Devices

So, what exactly is HarmonyOS? When announcing the OS, Huawei's CEO said that the OS was very different from Android and iOS, because it was designed to be used on a variety of devices, with similar usage experiences on those devices. So, according to Huawei, many usage scenarios that previously would require the presence of a new OS for a particular device can be answered with just one OS.

HarmonyOS uses a microkernel, with a distributed architecture. This allows the OS was born as a lightweight OS, efficient in utilizing existing resources, but that does not mean its function is less than other OS. Huawei mentioned that there are 4 main keys of this OS, which are seamless, smooth, secure, and unified.

"Seamless" here is called Huawei associated with the distributed architecture used. This OS can run on many devices, and applications developed for this OS can run on all devices, with the capability of collaboration between devices. As for "smooth", the optimization carried out, and the use of microkernel, is said to make efficiency increase up to 5x, and latency is reduced by 27.5%. This means that the "feel" of using this OS will feel smooth.

Next, to "secure", the microkernel in HarmonyOS is also simpler than the kernel on other OSes, so the possibility of a security hole that can cause harm is even smaller. In addition, the adoption of formal verification in the Trusted Execution Environment is also called to detect attacks in many scenarios, not limited to certain attack scenarios. Finally, for "unified", ARK Compiler which is also included by Huawei in HarmonyOS makes applications can be made with various programming languages, and utilizing development tools offered by Huawei, one application can be run on more than one type of smart device that uses HarmonyOS. Things to note, because this ARK Compiler is also used by Huawei on the Android OS on their smartphones, it could be that the Android application can also run on HarmonyOS.

Released as an Open Source OS

HarmonyOS is released by Huawei as an open-source OS, which means that many parties can be involved in its development going forward. Huawei said that they will encourage a lot of community formation to develop this OS, so that the adoption will be more and more diverse. They believe, this OS is one answer to the need for experience that is evenly distributed across devices, in the current IoT and AI era.