Huawei Developer’s Conference: HarmonyOS 2.0 launched, work on non-Android phone to begin later this year

With Harmony OS, the firm has already confirmed that its an alternative to Android and with today’s announcement the firm looks closer to launching the new operating system on smartphones.

Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G (Huawei)

Huawei, at its developer's conference in Shenzhen, China, unveiled the second version of its HarmonyOS operating system. It also gave more details on the future of the software and the smartphone business. At the event, Consumer business CEO Richard Yu mentioned that HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK will available to developers starting today. However, it won't be available for smartphones. Once can get the SDKs for smartwatches, car head units, and TV platforms. The smartphone SDK will be coming around December this year, as mentioned by The Verge. 

With the growing tension between China and the US, Huawei is trying its best to stay self-dependant on the software side of things, which for now is supported by US-based Google's Android. With Harmony OS, the firm has already confirmed that its an alternative to Android and with today's announcement the firm looks closer to launching the new operating system on smartphones, marking the end of Android based Huawei (and possibly Honor) phones.

Huawei has also announced its OpenHarmony project, which has kicked off today. This is said to help developers build an open-source version of the OS, something which Google's Android also does. For now, the project reportedly supports 128MB of RAM or below. However, the support will go up to 4GB by next year, followed by a complete removal of the limit by later next year.

Today's announcement also falls in line with a recent report that stated Huawei to launch a HarmonyOS smartphone in 2021. The report even cited Yu saying that Huawei is ready with a Harmony OS smartphone but has not been able to launch it considering it was already in an agreement with Google.