Huawei officially replaces Android with HarmonyOS, which is also Android

[TheReal1980]

Summary

Thanks to nearly identical code bases, Huawei can update "Android" to "HarmonyOS."

 

Quotes

Quote

 This morning in a livestream, Huawei officially kicked off the launch of Harmony OS, its in-house operating system and (among other things) its replacement for Android. The company announced a new watch, a new tablet, and a new phone powered by HarmonyOS. The company also said it would be updating a massive list of 100 different Huawei Android phone models to Harmony OS over the next year.

Quote

With today's announcement, Huawei looks like it has two completely different operating systems that it calls "HarmonyOS." First is the IoT and smartwatch version of HarmonyOS, which is based on Huawei's LiteOS and is open source. The second version of Harmony OS is for phones and tablets and is a fork of Android and uses the Linux kernel (Huawei is very reluctant to admit this). Having what seems like two totally different operating systems share the same brand name leads to a lot of confusion, and you can make a lot of claims about the IoT version of HarmonyOS that don't apply to the phone version.

Quote

For instance, TechCrunch spoke to Huawei and reported "Huawei denied speculations that HarmonyOS is a derivative of Android and said no single line of code is identical to that of Android. A spokesperson for Huawei declined to say whether the operating system is based on Linux, the kernel that powers Android." This statement is true of the IoT version but untrue of the phone version. Meanwhile, the company said the complete opposite thing to the German site ComputerBase, which quotes Huawei's software president as saying "To make sure our existing users can still enjoy the experiences that they are familiar with in our phones and tablets, Huawei uses the open source code from AOSP in HarmonyOS on the condition of complying with open source license rules and fulfilling related responsibilities and obligations."

Quote

Forking Android is not a big deal, and huge companies like Amazon do it for its FireOS. The difference is that Amazon is upfront about it and says "FireOS is a fork of Android" in the first paragraph of its developer documents. Huawei's developer documents don't reference Android and are mostly pure gibberish—and by that I mean they are paragraphs of buzzwords and circular links that don't actually communicate any technical information about what the OS is or how it works.

 

My thoughts

Huawei said proudly a couple of years ago that it would create it's own OS, it did not need Android. It still says it today while building on it. How can you trust a brand that lies openly like this? Just admit it and move on, this is just sad.

 

Sources

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/huaweis-harmonyos-will-rollout-to-100-android-models-over-the-next-year/

[Icarus_Radio]

Haha, this is Huawei's biggest scam ever.

If you ever doubt whether Huawei's HarmonyOS is AOSP on Chinese social media, you will be attacked by floods of Huawei fans or maniacs.

[Zmimgo]

As a chinese human being, I see this perfectly normal. Basically the same as the new Xiaomi logo, which cost 2 million to make, just to round the corners of the logo.

 

(first part was a joke, second part wasn't)

[Amias]

Probably got tired of software developers pulling apart their spyware.

 

Now they can bake it into the OS!

[Jet_ski]

It’s just window dressing for US sanctions against the company. They took Android and rebranded it like the *is for me meme.

[suicidalfranco]

Just Chinese things

[NeuesTestament]

I think the move from Android to Android was really necessary for the company. Being stuck on Android blocked them from doing a lot of stuff, but now that they are on Android they can run with their creative ideas.

[TheReal1980]

Hmm... where have I seen this before?

 

Huawei

 

 

Presentation material

 

 

Apple

 

iPadOS

WatchOS

 

Presentation material

 

//// Here is the Huawei commercial just for proof:

 

[Levent]

46 minutes ago, Amias said:

Probably got tired of software developers pulling apart their spyware.

 

Now they can bake it into the OS!

its not like they werent doing that with android. 

[Arika]

I don't think anyone was under the assumption that harmonyOS wasn't going to be based on AOSP. I'm pretty sure when they first announced it they said it was going to be based on AOSP. 

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, TheReal1980 said:

Hmm... where have I seen this before?

 

Huawei

 

 

Presentation material

 

 

Apple

 

iPadOS

WatchOS

 

Presentation material

 

//// Here is the Huawei commercial just for proof:

 

Have to be honest:
 Makes me want to grab the gaming monitor and the tablet

[StDragon]

Keeping security HarmonyOS-ly in line *cough cough*

 

I doubt the US military will allow the use of such products by active duty soldiers.

[WkdPaul]

* thread cleaned *

 

Politics isn't allowed, so please keep it within rules outlined in the Community Standards

[TetraSky]

The fact that they go out of their way to avoid saying it's Android... is kind of pathetic, really.

 

I guess they figured making their own OS was a bad idea due to the fact no one would develop apps it and if they were going to be building an Android emulator to run the millions of existing apps, they may as well just go with Android from the get go, eh.

[Icarus_Radio]

3 hours ago, Arika S said:

I don't think anyone was under the assumption that harmonyOS wasn't going to be based on AOSP. I'm pretty sure when they first announced it they said it was going to be based on AOSP. 

Nope, when they announced HarmonyOS first time in 2019, it was a mircokernel-based, formally verified, and distributed operating system. However, Android uses Linux which is almost none of above.

Now they just rebrand the HarmonyOS as an ecosystem that allows many devices connect to each other. In this new branding, AOSP is of course allowed to be a part of it.

[Murasaki]

looks like my P20 Lite won't be getting HarmonyOS

 

5 hours ago, TheReal1980 said:

snip

Yeah they're looking to be the chinese apple, how original. Also since the beginning ive found "MatePad" to be a.... stupid name.

[BuckGup]

I'm not sure why Hauwei gets so much flack. Yes they are complete clones of other products but they aren't bad at all and are super inexpensive and in some cases actually better. 

[wanderingfool2]

8 hours ago, TheReal1980 said:

Huawei said proudly a couple of years ago that it would create it's own OS, it did not need Android. It still says it today while building on it. How can you trust a brand that lies openly like this? Just admit it and move on, this is just sad.

2 hours ago, TetraSky said:

The fact that they go out of their way to avoid saying it's Android... is kind of pathetic, really.

It's not like they have much choice but to.  It's very important to remember that there are sanctions against Huawei from using Android, had those sanctions not existed they likely never would have created their "own" OS but rather just kept using Android.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Arika S said:

I don't think anyone was under the assumption that harmonyOS wasn't going to be based on AOSP. I'm pretty sure when they first announced it they said it was going to be based on AOSP. 

My impression is that's basically just the same Android they were using before but with all the serial numbers filed off. That's ultimately the end goal of any Chinese company. Steal western IP, file the serial numbers off, sell it back to westerners to undermine the IP. Like nobody should ever be surprised when "Cheap Chinese products" are just asset-flips of Western ones.

 

More to the point though, this likely isn't going to get them un-sanctioned. While I do think maybe it was overkill to have western companies rip out their 5G Huawei equipment, perhaps it's for the best if it makes paranoid Western countries behave.

[TheReal1980]

28 minutes ago, Kisai said:

More to the point though, this likely isn't going to get them un-sanctioned. While I do think maybe it was overkill to have western companies rip out their 5G Huawei equipment, perhaps it's for the best if it makes paranoid Western countries behave.

If I remember correctly it was Taiwan who warned everyone years before.

[kvuj]

14 hours ago, Arika S said:

I don't think anyone was under the assumption that harmonyOS wasn't going to be based on AOSP. I'm pretty sure when they first announced it they said it was going to be based on AOSP. 

Weren't they supposed to use their in house microkernel already tested from their IoT department?¹ If they did that, I doubt they would use Android userspace components like bionic, sufraceflinger and others that are quite Linux-y.

 

I was personally interested to see if a new operating system would bring interesting ideas to the table (kinda like fuchsia did with its fair scheduler, message passing in the kernel, capabilities sandboxing, etc) but instead we got... nothing.

 

Also they supposedly had a blazing fast compiler for Android and HarmonyOS but when people realised it was garbage the site got taken down (https://www.openarkcompiler.cn/)(https://web.archive.org/web/20210204161129if_/https://www.openarkcompiler.cn/home).

 

Thoroughly disappointed.

 

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS - First paragraph

[GamerDude]

I had a Huawei P30 Pro, liked it because of its awesome camera, I used it as a backup phone to my Z Fold 2. I think it was sometime last year, when Huawei announced that it was going to use HarmonyOS that I'd said, "Hell, NO!!!" I sold it off , didn't lose money on it as I'd gotten it used/pre-owned.  

 

I'd then bought a Samsung Note 10+ (from my friend) as my backup phone. I hadn't looked back since, I'm Chinese, but not from China, and I trust Huawei about as far as I can throw a Type 99 MBT.

[ARikozuM]

I've never been happier than the day I traded my ToyotaOS vehicle for a PriusOS vehicle. 

[Roswell]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

My impression is that's basically just the same Android they were using before but with all the serial numbers filed off. That's ultimately the end goal of any Chinese company. Steal western IP, file the serial numbers off, sell it back to westerners to undermine the IP. Like nobody should ever be surprised when "Cheap Chinese products" are just asset-flips of Western ones.

 

More to the point though, this likely isn't going to get them un-sanctioned. While I do think maybe it was overkill to have western companies rip out their 5G Huawei equipment, perhaps it's for the best if it makes paranoid Western countries behave.

AOSP exists to be ported for commercial use. That’s the whole point of it…

 

They’re not stealing or ripping off anything.

 

https://source.android.com

[Laborant]

16 minutes ago, Roswell said:

They’re not stealing or ripping off anything.

Is Harmony OS therefore Open-Source? To my knowledge, it is not allowed to "change" a project under GPL and distribute it being proprietary. You are allowed to "link against" an open source project (such as the CLib in Linux) and use open source tools to generate closed-source tools. But the very moment you CHANGE the open source tools, you have to name your changes.  

 

Am I wrong?