DONGGUAN, China—Ending months of speculations, Huawei finally revealed HarmonyOS, its much-rumored and talked-about operating system that could replace Android.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, made the announcement last week at the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2019) and explained the company’s reason for developing its own OS.
“We’re entering a day and age where people expect a holistic intelligent experience across all devices and scenarios. To support this, we felt it was important to have
an operating system with improved cross-platform capabilities. We needed an OS that supports all scenarios, that can be used across a broad range of devices and platforms, and that can meet consumer demand for low latency and strong security.”
The company made it clear that HarmonyOS is not meant to replace Android on smartphones as they’d like to continue their partnership with Google, but if push comes to shove, Huawei said it can switch to HarmonyOS in about two days.
“If you’re asking when we will apply this to the smartphone, we can do it at any time,” said Yu, adding that Huawei still prioritizes Google’s Android operating system. “However, if we cannot use it [Android] in the future, we can immediately switch to HarmonyOS.”
FROM HONGMENG TO HARMONY
PRIOR to the revelation of its global name, HarmonyOS was known as Hongmeng OS, which has an interesting translation and backstory in the Chinese language.
Hongmeng was named after a character from Chinese mythology that symbolizes primordial chaos or the world before creation. Other interpretations include vast mist or breaking free of the chaos and starting something new from scratch—something that Huawei is preparing for should the US trade ban prevents it from using Android on future phones.
As early as 10 years ago, the brand said it envisioned a future where intelligence would seamlessly integrate with all aspects of our lives, and it began exploring how it might deliver this experience—one that would transcend the boundaries of physical space and span different hardware and platforms.
HarmonyOS is completely different from Android and iOS. It is a microkernel-based operating system that is similar to the Fuschia OS that Google is working on. It delivers a smooth experience across all scenarios, and is a trustworthy and secure architecture, supporting seamless collaboration across devices. This means you can develop your apps once, then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices.
HarmonyOS is a lightweight, compact OS with powerful functionality, and it can be used in everything from smartphones to smart speakers, wearables, and in-vehicle systems to create a shared ecosystem across devices. Through this implementation, Huawei aims to establish an integrated and shared ecosystem across devices, create a secure and reliable runtime environment, and deliver a holistic intelligent experience across every interaction with every device. The OS will also be released as an open-source platform worldwide to encourage adoption.
FOUR DISTINCT FEATURES
HARMONYOS was designed with four distinct technical features to deliver on its promise to consumers: seamless, smooth, secure and unified.
SEAMLESS: HarmonyOS is the first-ever device OS with distributed architecture, delivering a seamless experience across devices. By adopting distributed architecture and distributed virtual bus technology, the OS offers a shared communications platform, distributed data management, distributed task scheduling and virtual peripherals.
With HarmonyOS, app developers won’t have to deal with the underlying technology for distributed apps, allowing them to focus on their own individual service logic. Developing distributed apps will be easier than ever before. Apps built on HarmonyOS can run on different devices while delivering a seamless, collaborative experience across all scenarios.
SMOOTH: HarmonyOS will address underperformance challenges with a Deterministic Latency Engine and high-performance Inter Process Communication (IPC). The Deterministic Latency Engine sets task execution priorities and time limits for scheduling in advance. Resources will gravitate toward tasks with higher priorities, reducing the response latency of apps by 25.7 percent. The microkernel can make IPC performance up to five times more efficient than existing systems.
SECURE: HarmonyOS uses a brand-new microkernel design that features enhanced security and low latency. This microkernel was designed to simplify kernel functions, implement as many system services as possible in user mode outside the kernel, and add mutual security protection. The microkernel itself provides only the most basic services like thread scheduling and IPC.
The OS’s microkernel design uses formal verification methods to reshape security and trustworthiness from the ground up in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Formal verification methods are an effective mathematical approach to validate system correctness from the source, while traditional verification methods, such as functional verification and attack simulation, are confined to limited scenarios. Formal methods, by contrast, can use data models to verify all software running paths.
HarmonyOS is the first OS to use formal verification in device TEE, significantly improving security. In addition, because the HarmonyOS microkernel has much less code (roughly one-thousandth the amount of the Linux kernel), the probability of attack is greatly reduced.
UNIFIED: Powered by a multidevice IDE, multilanguage unified compilation, and a distributed architecture kit, HarmonyOS can automatically adapt to different screen layout controls and interactions, and support both drag-and-drop control and preview-oriented visual programming. This allows developers to more efficiently build apps that run on multiple devices. With a multidevice IDE, developers can code their apps once and deploy them across multiple devices, creating a tightly integrated ecosystem across all user devices.
The Huawei ARK Compiler is the first static compiler that can perform on par with Android’s virtual machine, enabling developers to compile a broad range of advanced languages into machine code in a single, unified environment. By supporting unified compilation in multiple languages, the Huawei ARK Compiler will help developers greatly improve their productivity.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
PERHAPS the biggest difference is that unlike Android, HarmonyOS doesn’t include Linux at its core. For its futuristic OS, Huawei has developed an entirely new microkernel that essentially means it puts system components in different, segmented sections, instead of putting them into one big box as Android does.
Kernels are the core of an operating system, and they contain thousands of lines of code that controls everything on your device. A microkernel is smaller in size than a monolithic kernel (like Linux) and it only includes the bare minimum amount of code that’s required to run the operating system.
To make things a bit more simpler, think of it as Lego bricks forming a bigger set piece. Currently, Android developers have to customize and mess around with the entire set to make Android do a specific action for their app. With HarmonyOS, they only need to tinker with that specific Lego brick that corresponds to the action they want to assign. This makes the process faster as this reduces the amount of time a developer needs to creating an app since they don’t have to deal with a lot of unnecessary codes they don’t actually need.
It’s NOT an Android competitor (yet). As mentioned earlier, if given the choice, Huawei still wants to keep working with Google and the Android system, and instead wants to focus on bringing HarmonyOS to smart screens, smart speakers, car head units, and other AI, IoT and 5G-based technologies.
It is said to be theoretically faster than Android because the HarmonyOS uses distributed task scheduling and distributed data management to improve its performance. Android, on the other hand, uses a lot of redundant code, outdated scheduling mechanism and has fragmentation issues. The HarmonyOS microkernel structure has a Deterministic Latency Engine that uses real-time load analysis, app characteristics matching, and forecasting to allocate system resources in a better way. This results in up to 25.7 percent improved response latency and 55.6 percent improvement in latency fluctuation.
The HarmonyOS is indeed shaping up to be something amazing and has gotten a lot of people excited, but at the end of the day, its success will be decided by the app ecosystem it can build. Google and Apple have proven that the company who owns the app market owns the smartphone industry, and Huawei will be facing an “app-hill” battle to lure developers to port their apps to its Play Store alternative called AppGallery.
To encourage broader adoption, Huawei will release HarmonyOS as an open-source platform worldwide. The company will also establish an open-source foundation and an open-source community to support more in-depth collaboration with developers. HarmonyOS doesn’t support Android apps but Huawei says that doing so will be very easy for the developers as the company has released all the required SDKs and other tools that will help developers recompile their apps for HarmonyOS.
Last, HarmonyOS will not have root access which Huawei believes should further improve the overall security of the microkernel and of the devices. Huawei is also using “formal verification methods” to boost the security of its microkernel. These mathematical approaches are used in security-critical fields, such as aerospace and chipsets.
WILL THE MATE 30 RUN HARMONYOS?
WITH the US export ban reprieve ending next week, rumors have once again surfaced that the Huawei will be releasing a HarmonyOS-powered phone in the fourth quarter of the year along with the Huawei Mate 30 series. Reports point out to the Mate 30 Lite, but again the company said it will use Android as long as it can.
This will be a big deviation from the original evolution roadmap for HarmonyOS presented at the HDC 2019. Huawei said version 1.0 will be first adopted in its smart screen products, such as the Honor View which was also released last week.
Over the next three years, HarmonyOS will be optimized and gradually adopted across a broader range of smart devices, including wearables, Huawei Vision, and head units for cars.
China already has a strong app ecosystem and a massive user base; it just needs to have more apps for the rest of the international market. Moving forward, Huawei will lay the foundations for HarmonyOS in the Chinese market, and then expand it further to the global ecosystem. With a focus on providing new and unique value, Huawei will open up and share its core capabilities in areas like connectivity, cameras, and AI.
HarmonyOS will bring incredible new benefits to consumers, equipment vendors and developers. For consumers, it will bring a cohesive and powerful intelligent experience across all aspects of their lives.
For equipment vendors, it will help them gain a first-mover advantage in the age of holistic intelligent experience, where 5G, AI and IoT will see explosive growth. At the same time, the OS will enable developers to win over more users with less investment, and rapidly innovate services across all scenarios.
“We believe HarmonyOS will revitalize the industry and enrich the ecosystem,” said Richard Yu. “Our goal is to bring people a truly engaging and diverse experience. We want to invite developers from around the world to join us as we build out this new ecosystem. Together, we will deliver an intelligent experience for consumers in all scenarios.”