Huawei officially announced its homegrown operating system known as HarmonyOS. This thing was in rumors for months. After the blacklisting by the US Government, Huawei no longer had the access to Google’s Android ecosystem.
It was no secret that Huwaei has been working on a new operating system of its own but it would be a substitute for Androids was unclear, till now.
It’s a microkernel-based distributed operating system and it will be released as an open-source platform worldwide destined for smart TVs, smartwatches, and in vehicles, any smart device that you can name.
At the company’s developer conference, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei said that HarmonyOS will be made available later this year for deployment in smart screen products such as TV, smart watches and in-vehicle infotainment systems and aim to bring it on more devices including smartphones in the next three years.
Huawei claims that HarmonyOS’ microkernel is one-thousandth the amount of code in the Linux kernel and more powerful and secure than Android. Huawei also claims that HarmonyOS’ IPC performance is five times that of Google’s Fuchsia.
HarmonyOS will feature a Deterministic Latency Engine that can better allocate system resources using real-time analysis and forecasting. And on the other hand, Android is still stuck with the Linux kernel‘s less-intelligent fair scheduling mechanism.
It’s a tough competition out there in tech industry, it won’t be easy for Harmony OS to succeed. So as for now the main focus for the operating system will be products for the Chinese market, before Huawei expands it to other markets.