Huawei’s HarmonyOS is expected to get to version 4.0 with the release of that version scheduled for August 4th.
HarmonyOS, the operating system that Huawei transitioned to with the lack of Google’s Android after the imposition of restrictions on it by the United States government against having its mostly Western partners directly supply it with technology, is not something we focus on around here a lot. Heck, since its early days, we’ve barely been back to check up on what has been happening to it.
And, for good reason. Huawei has largely kept HarmonyOS-powered devices away from the international market, limiting them to its home market where it still holds some sway despite the intense competition from rivals who have everything working for them.
Behind the scenes and in public, Huawei has been pushing through with its efforts to make HarmonyOS, which runs on everything from the company from wearables to televisions to cars with the smartphone at the centre, better.
Now, other than that we may get to interact with HarmonyOS here in Kenya and elsewhere outside China in the future, its progress should get your antenna up because, for the most part, lots of new features to HarmonyOS still make it to the devices within our reach as Huawei figures out a way of baking them into EMUI, its custom Android overlay.
HarmonyOS is still some form of Android/based on Android but it is far from the Android that you know. It is a fork of Android, just like Amazon’s FireOS. What that means is that Huawei used the open source part of the Android source code to come up with something of their own that they maintain at their pace and on their terms. From a user’s point of view, that means no access to the Google services that define the Android experience known to most of us as well as an alternative app store with apps intended for it and the platform in general.
On the smartphone, if you have used a Huawei smartphone over the past decade, you should be pretty much at home with HarmonyOS as it is just an exact replica of EMUI on older Huawei Android smartphones.
A year ago, while unveiling HarmonyOS version 3, Huawei said that Harmony OS powered over 300 million devices.
