Chinese technology group Huawei has announced that the latest version of its operating system, HarmonyOS Next, will no longer support applications developed for the Android system.
The company’s executive, Richard Yu, explained at a presentation event that HarmonyOS Next has dispensed with Linux or Unix kernels, developing its own kernels, file system, programming language, artificial intelligence framework, and language models, according to the Yicai newspaper.
Since its debut in 2019, HarmonyOS has been compatible with apps developed for Android.
Huawei expanded its native HarmonyOS app offering last September, attracting businesses and developers from various fields such as social networking, audio and video, gaming, news, and finance to build a proprietary ecosystem for HarmonyOS.
Yu, quoted by Yicai, said that about 800 million devices have HarmonyOS installed on devices such as mobile phones, computers, TVs, and cars and that his company plans to have 5,000 native HarmonyOS apps before the end of this year.
Nearly half of China’s top 200 apps have started developing native HarmonyOS apps, including electronic payments platform Alipay, video platform Bilibili, and home delivery giant Meituan.
According to a research report by Shengang Securities released by Yicai, there were about 2.6 million apps available in the Chinese market at the end of last year, of which potentially one million would have to migrate from Android to HarmonyOS, with a market value of 10 billion yuan (about 1.3 billion euros).
The sanctions imposed by the United States on Huawei, announced in May 2019 and based on the company’s alleged links to the Chinese military, resulted in the US Google being banned from selling products to the Chinese brand.
These products included mobile applications from the Google Store and licenses for updates to the Android operating system, on which the devices of the Chinese company were based, which then began to develop its own system, HarmonyOS.
Last month, Huawei’s rotating chairman, Ken Hu, said the company had managed to “weather the storm” after years of sanctions from Washington.
Hu predicted that Huawei would end 2023 with revenues of more than 700 billion yuan (€91 billion), an increase of more than 9%, compared to 2022 turnover.
Time to get a new phone…
Samantha Gannon
info at madeira-weekly.com
Photo: JM
