Harmony OS: Necessity is the Mother of Invention
Harmony OS (called Hongmeng in China) has been announced on Friday 9 August at HDC (Huawei Developer Conference). As its name indicates, it is supposed to bring more convince and harmony to the world of smart devices.
In May, Huawei was placed on the USA trade blacklist that prevented American companies from trading with Huawei, that has prevented Google from providing its services and operating system Android to Huawei devices. This ban has accelerated the development and the announcement of the Harmony OS “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”.
While Harmony OS is ready to pull the plug on Android in case anything bad happens, but Hauwie doesn’t want to compete with the Android ecosystem because it doesn’t have an App store like Google Play and many companies like Microsoft and Samsung had failed to build such ecosystem. So there is no need to be urgent.
Harmony OS has some promising features:
- One for all
While companies like Apple and Google utilize different operating systems for each device because one recipe doesn’t fit all, Harmony OS is designed to fit all devices : TV, Handsets, wearable devices, Laptops, Mobile phones…etc. therefore all devices can easily communicate.
2. MicroKernel based system
Harmony OS is microkernel-based, like Google’s Fuchsia OS but the later has not been realized yet. This architecture makes it possible to use one OS for different devices.
In Harmony OS Vision, the devices are seen like a pool of ressources so they can be accessed by any service.
3. Distributed System
Hauwei presented the Distributed Virtual Bus which can connect multiple devices, a customer has one account but many devices, the devices can share their capabilities using the Distributed Virtual Bus. For example, if you don’t have a camera on your watch you can directly access the camera of your mobile phone.
4. Open Source
which makes it easy to be used from other companies on their devices and create a development community which would help to establish a big and competitive ecosystem.
Finally, Huawei has built something promising. The challenge now is to convenience the Apps developers to support its OS and get the popular Apps on its App store such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail and others. It is not so difficult to build an OS, the difficulty is to build an ecosystem between the OS and the application developers.
