Huawei has confirmed it will be rolling it’s HarmonyOS 2.0 in smartphones in 2021 during its annual developers’ conference 2020.An initial beta of the HarmonyOS 2.0 software for mobile devices will be available for Chinese developers by the end of this year.
Since May 2019, Huawei faced a myriad of challenges, the US Department of Commerce blacklisted citing that China could be using Huawei to spy on America. For this reason, most companies were barred from purchasing equipment from Huawei.
Google also suspended ist Android license following the US governments decision to blacklist the tech giant. Harmony Os will replace the Android OS.
last month, the US failed to renew the company’s Temporary General License (TGL), hence Huawei has lost access to Google’s support and updates to older devices.
Harmony OS is an in-house operating system from Huawei, first announced during the Huawei Developer Conference 2019 (HDC 2019) that would replace Android services after license suspension by Google.
The OS is similar to the android system hence, it will be a cross-platform solution. This means you can flexibly deploy your operating system to a variety of devices, including smartwatches, personal computers, cars, and more.
Huawei says the distributed technology in HarmonyOS and the newly released EMUI 11 enable interaction beyond smartphones, so consumers can control and access other devices. Notably, the touch-less connection between smartphones and HarmonyOS-based home devices should enable screen projection for video calls and content from phones to computers, TVs and other displays.
The Harmony system was first successfully deployed on the Honor brand smart TV sold in China.
Richard Yu, Huawei’s Executive Director and CEO of the Consumer BG in his keynote speech during the developer conference says, ” the initial version of HarmonyOS 2.0 will support devices with 128KB to 128MB of RAM”.
In April 2021, Huawei plans to add support for larger RAM devices between 128MB and 4GB. Finally, in October 2021, the company will add support for devices with 4+ GB RAM.
Huawei had earlier confirmed the OS would roll out initially in the Chinese market before it is released later to other markets. The 2020 roadmap also doesn’t mention on the rollout.
However, it hints s that the first batch of HarmonyOS smartphones may be targeted at the budget or mid-range segment with less than 4GB of RAM.