Huawei’s new HarmonyOS 2.0 is designed for smartphones and wearables

It isn't clear yet if Huawei plans to ditch Android entirely and switch to HarmonyOS 2.0 in the future.

What you need to know

• Huawei today announced v2.0 of its homegrown HarmonyOS.
• HarmonyOS 2.0 will be making its way to phones and several other smart devices next year.
• HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK for smartphones will arrive in December.

Huawei CEO Richard Yu today introduced the second version of the company's homegrown HarmonyOS at the annual Huawei Developer Conference in Shenzhen, China. While the first version of HarmonyOS introduced last year was primarily designed for "industrial use," HarmonyOS 2.0 will be used in smartphones, TVs, smartwatches, and car head units (via The Verge).

A beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK is being released for developers today, although the smartphone SDK will only be made available in December. Huawei expects to launch the first phones running HarmonyOS 2.0 sometime next year, although it is likely that the initial focus will be on the Chinese market.

Huawei claims HarmonyOS 2.0 brings smarter voice recognition, an "adaptive" user interface, security improvements, faster cross-device data transfers, and improved multi-screen functionality.

In addition to announcing HarmonyOS 2.0, Huawei also launched the OpenHarmony project today to enable development upon an open-source version of the operating system, similar to AOSP. Currently, however, the OpenHarmony project only supports devices with up to 128MB of RAM. Huawei expects to increase the memory limit to 4GB by April next year and remove it altogether by October 2021.

Additionally, the Chinese tech giant revealed that its app ecosystem now has over 96,000 apps, thanks to support from 1.8 million developers. It also talked about the latest HMS Core 5.0, which brings more than 12,000 scenario-specific APIs.

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