When Chinese technology major Huawei launched the much awaited '2.0' version of its HarmonyOS operating system on Wednesday night, the company revealed ambitious plans and expectations for the system. Huawei HarmonyOS has been projected as a rival to the dominance of Google and Apple in the operating system market.
The 1.0 version of HarmonyOS was unveiled in August 2019.
The launch of the HarmonyOS 2.0 comes two years after Huawei lost access to Google mobile services as the Donald Trump administration put the company on a trade blacklist.
Huawei claimed about 100 of its smartphones would use the HarmonyOS and the system would also be available on some tablets and smart screens towards the fourth quarter of this year.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer unit, praised the potential of HarmonyOS. Speaking at the launch event on Wednesday, Richard was quoted by Associated Press as saying, “The user experience of HarmonyOS has surpassed the experience of the Android era. We solved issues such as the slowing down and lagging of devices over time in the Android era... Our HarmonyOS has stronger functionality and endurance, and it will be the greatest operating system in this internet of things era."
Highlighting its features, the HarmonyOS has been touted as a highly-scalable distributed platform, which can be deployed across multiple devices such as smartphones and computers.
“Regardless of the size of the device, only one system can cover smart terminal devices with a memory as small as 128K, as large as 4GB or more, bringing consumers an ultimate full-scene interactive experience,” Wang Chenglu, president of Huawei's consumer software business, was quoted as saying by Global Times.
"It has potentially broader reach beyond smartphones, wearables and TVs like Android—so it expands the platform scalability and can attract more developers to the ecosystem," Neil Shah, an industry analyst at research institute Counterpoint, told the Global Times.
Huawei has announced partnerships with Chinese home appliances maker Midea and drone maker SZ DJI and Swiss watchmakers Tissot and Swatch to use HarmonyOS 2.0. The company had initially projected that up to 300 million devices would run on HarmonyOS 2.0 this year.
Worries for Huawei
Chinese industry analysts pointed out that the presence of a robust app ecosystem will be decisive in determining the success of the Huawei HarmonyOS 2.0.
"Does the HarmonyOS have enough apps that can attract consumers to update to the OS? That's another question," Liang Zhenpeng, an industry analyst told Global Times. "So far, more than 300 application and service partners, 1,000 hardware partners, and 500,000 developers have jointly participated in the construction of the Harmony ecosystem," Huawei had said on Wednesday.
The absence of Google services in China has also been seen as a challenge for the growth prospects of HarmonyOS 2.0. Lack of access to Google services like Gmail and YouTube could make HarmonyOS 2.0 unattractive for international users.
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“It'll be interesting to see what the HarmonyOS user interface looks like and whether there really are some features that give it a leg up with some users, but I'm not holding my breath. It still comes back to all the discussion that's been happening over the past couple years which is, if there's no Google services, that's a big problem,” Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices at market research firm IDC, was quoted as saying by Associated Press.
