Huawei wants to take HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide

umbrella , 1 month ago

is it proprietary? open source?

nothing against huawei but i'm not considering a closed ecosystem.

BrikoX OP Mod , 1 month ago

Mostly proprietary.

umbrella , 1 month ago

👎 then i could not care less

CorrodedCranium , 1 month ago

Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.

"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said.

According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain.

I haven't looked into HarmonyOS before but is the plan to work off of a compatibility layer like Wine or Anbox?

I have no idea how detached it is from Android or how willing companies are to embrace it.

BrikoX OP Mod , 1 month ago

It started as a fork of Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but with latest HarmonyOS NEXT version they removed AOSP compatibility layer and moved to using their own SDK. I suspect the actual API is similar (it's of course proprietary), so porting shouldn't be very hard, but it's still a chore, so it will be interesting to see if western companies decide it's worth their time.

CorrodedCranium , 1 month ago

Interesting. Thanks for filling me in