Back in April 2019, Huawei announced its custom operating system, HarmonyOS, detailing that the platform will be used in a variety of applications, including vehicles. Now during the HDC 2020, the Chinese giant has unveiled HarmonyOS 2.0, mentioning that the platform will be supported by smartphones, suggesting that Huawei is serious about taking on Android.
With Huawei’s Options Limited, the Company Will Also Make a Beta Version of HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK Available to Developers From Today
With HarmonyOS 2.0 intended to arrive for smartphones later most likely after being polished, Huawei has decided to speed up things exponentially by making a beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK available to developers today. Unfortunately, it will only support smartwatches, car head units, and TVs for now. Luckily, a smartphone version of the SDK is expected to arrive in December 2020, with Huawei executive Richard Yu hinting that smartphones running HarmonyOS might appear from 2021.
Similar to what AOSP is to Android, Huawei is also kicking off its OpenHarmony project, allowing developers to build upon an open-source version of the OS. Sadly the project only supports devices with 128MB of RAM or below, but of course, there are plans to expand it to 4GB RAM in April of next year, with the memory limit expected to be removed completely by October 2021.
The announcement of HarmonyOS 2.0 also serves as a cushion to shield Huawei somewhat from the U.S. ban. As of right now, Huawei’s options have started to cripple, to the extent that it won’t be able to make flagship Kirin chipsets. Qualcomm has reportedly agreed to supply its chipsets to Huawei, but unless they are given permission from the U.S. government, the alliance between the San Diego chipset manufacturer and Huawei won’t materialize.
Additionally, neither Huawei nor its executives have mentioned how limiting or how extensive the OS will be when running in smartphones so it looks like we’ll have to wait until 2021 to find out. If you wish to know more about HarmonyOS, we’ve provided a detailed explanation of the operating system to make sure to check it out.
The post Huawei’s HarmonyOS 2.0 Will Be Arriving to Smartphones, With an SDK Planned for Release in December 2020 by Omar Sohail appeared first on Wccftech.
source https://wccftech.com/huawei-harmonyos-2-0-coming-to-smartphones/