At the 2020 Huawei Developer Conference, Huawei Executive Director and CEO of Consumer Business Yu Chengdong announced the launch of HarmonyOS 2.0 and the official open source of HarmonyOS.
Yu Chengdong announced that Huawei will officially release the Beta version for mobile phone app developers in December 2020 and that Huawei smartphones will fully support HarmonyOS in 2021.
HarmonyOS 2.0 brings a comprehensive upgrade to its existing distributed capabilities, including software bus, data management, and security. Huawei also introduced an adaptive UX framework that allows developers to quickly reach tens of millions of new devices and users.
With the latest update, HarmonyOS will officially be open-source and developers will be able to gain access to emulators, SDK packages, and IDE tools. The open source project, which is donated to OpenAtom Foundation, will be launched in stages with a mobile HarmonyOS beta release planned firstly for Chinese developers at the end of 2020.
Richard Yu announced the roadmap for HarmonyOS in his keynote speech.
“Starting on 10 September, HarmonyOS is open to 128KB-128MB IoT devices, such as smart TVs, wearables, cars and more. In April 2021, we will open it to 128MB-4GB devices and in October 2021, HarmonyOS will be opened for devices above 4GB,” he said.
Based on the distributed technology in HarmonyOS, the newly released EMUI 11 enables interaction beyond smartphones. The new operating system allows devices interact with HarmonyOS-based IoT devices, bringing a unique all-scenario experience to users, including using the camera of a bigger-screen device for video calling.
The process is powered by the touchless connection between smartphones and HarmonyOS-based home devices, enabling screen projection and more.
In addition, Huawei announced the latest results of HMS at the press conference. At the end of June this year, Huawei released the HMS Core 5.0 version. Now the open capabilities of HMS Core 5.0 have increased from the original 14 Kits to 56 Kits, and the number of APIs has increased from 885 to 12,981.
