Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said at the company's developer conference on Friday that the version, called HarmonyOS Next, will be an operating system that is “originating in China, independent and controllable.” The Shenzhen-based company launched a beta version of HarmonyOS Next for developers at the conference, with a beta upgrade for consumers scheduled for August. Yu said at the conference that the mobile platform upgrade will be officially released for commercial use on Huawei's next flagship 5G smartphone series, the Mate 70, in the fourth quarter of this year.
Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies' Consumer Business Group, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Shenzhen on June 21, 2024. Photo: Weibo Huawei's latest announcement shows that it is looking to increase the presence of HarmonyOS in China after it unseated Apple's iOS as the second-largest mobile OS in mainland China in the first quarter.
Yu said that with HarmonyOS, Huawei has achieved in just 10 years what it took its Western peers 30 years to build a new operating system.
Huawei also claimed that HarmonyOS offers 10 percent improved performance over the Linux kernel that underpins the Android mobile platform.
HarmonyOS was launched as an alternative to Android in August 2019, three months after the US government added Huawei to its Entity List, a trade blacklist that bars Huawei from buying software, chips and other US-origin technology from suppliers without Washington's approval.
Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies' Consumer Business Group, introduced various applications of HarmonyOS at the company's annual developer conference in Shenzhen on June 21, 2024. Photo: Weibo
There are currently more than 900 million devices running on HarmonyOS, and more than 2.5 million developers are building apps for the platform, Yu said on Friday.
HarmonyOS adoption is accelerating on the back of rapid growth in Huawei's smartphone shipments. Shipments of the company's latest flagship smartphone, the Pura 70 series, which was launched in late April, were up 68% as of the end of May compared with the older P series in the same period last year, according to Yu. Shipments of Huawei's flagship Pura 70 series and Mate 60 series, which were launched last year, grew 72% in the first five months of this year, Yu said.
According to a report by Counterpoint Research, Huawei ranked fourth in China's smartphone market with a 15.5% share in the first quarter and sales up nearly 70%.
The company sees building an app ecosystem for HarmonyOS as “a crucial task for Huawei in 2024,” its rotating chairman, Xu Zhijun, said in April.
