Huawei fans have more than Singapore’s birthday to be thankful for this National Day, because the Chinese tech giant has finally unveiled their Android alternative.
Announced by Huawei CEO Richard Yu at the ongoing Huawei Developer Conference less than an hour ago, the Microkernal-based operating system — dubbed “Harmony OS” — will first appear on Huawei’s smart TV’s later this year, followed by wearables and laptops in 2020.
Wait, Micro-what? It’s a pretty technical term, but Microkernal basically means that the OS uses a non-distributed design that can easily be ported over to other devices.
Following Yu’s announcement, the Huawei Mobile Twitter account has been dropping additional information about Harmony OS — it’ll come with something called “Trusted Execution Environment” to improve security, and will be open source as well.
You might have noticed that there’s no mention of smartphones, and this is because Huawei intends to continue using Android if they can. In the event that they suddenly can’t, however, the company boasts that they’ll be able to make the switch to Harmony in no more than 2 days.
It’s been a rather confusing few weeks, with Huawei flip–flopping on whether the then-named HongMeng OS was compatible with smartphones, but it looks like they do have a safety net in place after all.
Header Image Credit: Huawei
