Huawei is continuously facing severe sanctions and lacks important access to US-developed software systems and hardware since 2019. This includes restrictions for not using any Google services in their smartphones and other Android platform devices. The lack of essential Google services such as Google Play Store, Google Maps in an Android device, is creating the distance between consumers and Huawei.
Huawei in response has already started working on its own operating system named HarmonyOS to tackle this challenge. During the company’s annual developer’s conference it is announced that HarmonyOS will be open source in a similar manner to that of AOSP (Android Open Source Project).
“The beta version of HarmonyOS 2.0 will be available on September 10th for developers, but will be available for smart TVs, watches and head units,” said Huawei head Richard Yu. “At the end of this year, the SDK tools and simulators of HarmonyOS 2.0 will be available to smartphones. Next year we will see smartphones running HarmonyOS 2.0,” he added.
As per the roadmap provided by Richard Yu, HarmonyOS will be available for all devices by the month of October 2021.
It is still unclear whether HarmonyOS will be available for global users or only for devices in China.