In the city of Dongguan, China, Huawei finally took the wraps off its long-rumored, first-party operating system. The OS, called Harmony OS, has been in development for several years, but it’s recently taken on a role as a key player in Huawei’s contingency plan since the U.S. enacted a trade ban on the Chinese technology company. At the Huawei Developer Conference, Huawei finally shared the first details about its in-house OS, but the company wasn’t ready to show off Harmony on smartphones just yet. Tomorrow, the company will show off Harmony OS on the Honor Vision TV. For now, Android remains the go-to mobile OS for Huawei and Honor smartphones and tablets.
The operating system runs on a custom microkernel architecture that’s been developed in-house, which makes sense considering Huawei has been holding talks about microkernels at FOSDEM for a few years now (2018, 2019). They claim it’s faster than the competition, more secure, and more flexible – so much so that they say they can switch over from Android in a matter of days.
Other details about HarmonyOS include no root access, because Huawei considers it a security risk. Huawei will be supplying an IDE for the operating system, capable of building applications for various device types. Huawei also intends to release HarmonyOS as open source.
There’s a lot of skepticism about Huawei’s ability to build an operating system out there, but I do not share that at all. Huawei is one of the largest, most successful technology companies in the world, for both enterprise networking technology as well as consumer technology, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they are more than capable of developing a good, solid operating system.
That being said, the real issue is of course that between iOS and Android, there isn’t really much room left for a viable third option. HarmonyOS could certainly work in China – especially since it boasts Android compatibility and Chinese Android phones are Google-free anyway – but in the rest of the world people expect their smartphones to be either iOS or Google Android. I highly doubt any non-Android smartphone, with or without Android application compatibility, has any serious chance in the market.
Which is obviously sad, but that’s the way it is.
It doesn’t have to be a commercial success yet, better to have some contingency plan than nothing at all I guess.
But do people really think Linux is controlled by just part of the world ? That doesn’t seem to be the case to me at all.
What reason would they have for not forking Linux and/or Android (if they had to) ?
“What reason would they have for not forking Linux and/or Android (if they had to) ?”
There are actually very good reasons to prefer microkernel architectures – mainly that by reducing the amount of code running in kernel space, the attack surface is drastically reduced.
And now that every cpu is multicore, there’s no more reason to stay on the monolith side.
I don’t know; but after being burnt because they relied on “Western country tech.” it’s possible their reasons are not technical (and more social or political).
However; from a marketing point of view it’s hard to say that your product is better than the competition when it’s the same tired old sludge that everyone else has been regurgitating for a decade; and really easy to find ways to improve on Linux (which, if you dig deep enough, is significantly flawed for everything that isn’t an “all tasks are the same, no graphics, no user interfaces, no power management,” server under constant load). Even Google (after years of modifying a fork of Linux) are “tentatively” developing a micro-kernel alternative.
Users use applications. Applications use the OS. The OS uses the hardware. If all the same Android applications work the average user won’t have much reason to know or care what the OS is.
The real problem would be convincing application developers to register/upload their apps (with no change to the code whatsoever) to a different “walled garden” store. If that means 10 minutes of fiddling to unlock a huge Chinese consumer market (that initially won’t be full of competing app developers) I can’t see that being a problem.
Of course this all assumes HarmonyOS isn’t awful and Android app compatibility isn’t full of bugs. There’s no way to guess about that.
Brendan,
I think that’s wise. Even if there’s no technical motivation being dependent on western tech is pretty dangerous right now due to political tensions.
Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the trump administration banned all american companies from doing business with huawei unless they get government approval. That could pose a problem for app developers who are willing to sell through huawei’s new app store. I think it will hurt the chances for harmonyOS to compete against android and IOS in the west.
https://www.theplanettoday.com/why-huawei-mobile-phones-banned-by-us/
I think huawei is just a victim of trump’s trade war. Whether or not blacklisting it will work depends on whether or not the US will succeed in pressuring allies overseas to do the same. If the rest of the world supports harmonyOS, strategically withholding android could backfire and strengthen the competition against android and IOS, It’ll be interesting to watch this space.
I’d assume that (compared to countries like China and India, and compared to the EU as a collective) US app developers are a relatively insignificant minority.
For the short term, Huawei is a victim of Trump’s trade war. For the long term, I have a feeling that Apple and Google (and US citizens in general) are going to be the biggest victims (and the rest of the world will be better off due to healthier competition).
If HarmonyOS is good (and rolled out cautiously), and if Huawei decides to sell “Harmony OS phones” at zero profit (or even at a loss) to establish market share (and to really stick the knife into their US competitors), I could even imagine Apple ceasing to exist within 10 years (and Huawei being extremely glad that they were goaded into putting up a fierce defense).
> I’d assume that (compared to countries like China and India, and compared to the EU as a collective) US app developers are a relatively insignificant minority.
lol
“Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the trump administration banned all american companies from doing business with huawei unless they get government approval”
Whaaaaaat ? And what about free trade ? Can’t the US cope with fair competition and have the resort to such practices, coming from the land of the WTO ?
To be fair, China isn’t honouring their free trade obligations, finding all kinds of “innovative” ways to tax imports to the mainland, force foreign companies to transfer knowledge to Chinese companies and ignore trademark violations. For example, you can make a “Samsung” phone in China as long as you cover the “Samsung” logo with a scratch-card paint the end user can scratch off like they would on a gift card.
Serves then right. It’s time we started looking at what is fair not what is tactful.
There are lots of reasons to criticize China (and lots of reasons to criticize lots of other countries too); but these are not valid reasons.
China isn’t finding all kinds of “innovate” ways to tax imports. They’re responding to US tariffs by doing the same as the US.
China isn’t forcing companies to transfer knowledge; they’re saying “if and only if you want to sell stuff to us you’ll need to transfer knowledge” and letting companies decide if they want to do that or not. If you want to say that US companies are unethical for voluntarily agreeing to China’s conditions, then say hello to capitalism (where profit takes priority over ethics). If you want to say capitalism is unethical (because profit takes priority over ethics), then…
For trademarks; sure – different countries have different laws. Expecting every country to have exactly the same trademark laws as US is as silly as expecting every country to have exactly the same (e.g) firearm laws as US.
Note: WTO rules are that a country has to treat both foreign and local trademarks equally. In other words; for goods sold in China; if China’s laws allow a Chinese company to cover a different Chinese company’s trademark with a scratch-card, then China’s laws must also allow a Chinese company to cover a foreign company’s trademark with a scratch-card, and allow a foreign company to cover a Chinese company’s trademark with a scratch-card.
In other words, China has subverted every free trade rule. Serves them right.
“What about free trade?”
What about it? Trump was never for it. He has always been protectionist in his rhetoric.
“Huawei is one of the largest, most successful technology companies in the world, for both enterprise networking technology as well as consumer technology”
That should come as no surprise. They’ve stolen from the best 😀
That’s nice from a country that put “bugs” all around even in their “partner’s government offices”. Because you believe in the “US is all about freedom and friendship” PR BS ?
I’m not from where you think I am and you have no idea what I believe
That you believe that “they’ve stolen from the best” ?
A fact is not a belief
https://www.prosperousamerica.org/top_five_cases_of_huawei_ip_theft_and_patent_infringement
Samsung has been trying this for years. Outside China without Google Services it will be a flop no matter if it can run all other Android apps.
People all over the world love Google and that’s a fact.
They can try though. Will be interesting to see if they can do better then companies like Microsoft and Samsung who are bigger and failed.
“It doesn’t have to be a commercial success yet, better to have some contingency plan than nothing at all I guess.”
You guys just don’t get it, do you?
Goggle needs China. China doesn’t need Goggle.
There’s a reason why China refers to itself thoughout all it’s various incarnations though the centuries as the “Middle Kingdom”
They are most certainly caught up in the trade war as much for that they represent as anything else.
Huawei built themselves by (rather shamelessly) stealing Western IP. Everyone knew they were doing it and we saw clone after clone. Now, they have grown big enough to not only compete, but exceed (5g) Western competition.
I’d love to see more info about Harmony OS, but right now I’m cautious about anything that appears on slides without technical details. The FOSDEM slides are interesting (could Harmony OS be derived from HelenOS?), but are talking about improving microkernal performance through changes to hardware design. This clearly isn’t Huawei’s short term plan with Harmony OS. The slides from the event fit with the message in the FOSDEM slides, but not the conclusions.
Everything points to them having a really solid IoT-oriented OS (e.g. the info about formal verification is really interesting and I don’t see why they’d say this if they weren’t doing it). But that’s not yet the same as a smartphone OS. Their claim about switching from Android in 1-2 days sounds far fetched to me. Commercially sensible rhetoric rather than technical reality.
However I also wouldn’t underestimate Huawei’s technical or financial capability. They can probably move faster than Google, Apple et al. I’d love to see the actual results, but there’s too little detail here in some key areas to come to any sensible conclusion.
Just tell me they didn’t write the thing in some god-forsaken language with unsafe arrays, C-strings and loose pointers like C or C++.
It started out as a WordPress theme, and it kind of when from there, which is why much of it is written in PHP 5.2. 😛
I’m pretty sure it is. I’m not sure what else they would have written it in given it’s origins as an IoT OS, and how 2012 has been pegged as it’s origin year. Rust makes the most sense, and it appeared in 2010. I guess the could write the thing in Lisp or Haskell, but that seems unlikely.
The bigger question is what kernel is it based on? Minix, L4, Genode? It seems unlikely this is a greenfield product.
Oh, come on. Where’s your sense of adventure? I say, let HarmonyOS be another hackable system!
Put in a more serious manner: If you don’t want Google to be the gatekeepers for Android, why choose differently for HarmonyOS? Do you trust Huawei?
If it’s been formally verified, as they claim, it should at least be type safe.
Oh hey. It has a Github repo.
Here is the break down per Github:
– C 93.5%
– C++ 1.5%
– Shell 1.5%
– Assembly 1.4%
– Perl 0.8%
– Makefile 0.7%
– Other 0.6%
https://github.com/Awesome-HarmonyOS/HarmonyOS
There you go. 93.5% C.
“Just tell me they didn’t write the thing in some god-forsaken language with unsafe arrays, C-strings and loose pointers like C or C++.”
Yeah. they should be using .crap or the useless flavor-of-the-day Gnome 3 fanboys like yourself are currently using.
Remember-Burger King’s Impossible Whopper is really Soylent Green…..
Yes they should, Joe Monco. There is a reason most critical exploits in Android userland happen in the multimedia stack, and this reason is C and C++.
What’s the point of having a minimal kernel (presumably written in C or assembly) just to write the other bits also in C (or assembly?). You get some process separation sure, but so much potential wasted when it comes to eliminating memory leaks and minimizing exploits.
What really bugs me is that I believe ther was alread an OS called Harmony.
Or was it a GUI?
I think there was, and I think it was a themed Linux distro.