> Another major nit I have to pick with HarmonyOS is its lack of access and transparency. Just accessing the SDK and emulator required me to go through an insane process that involved uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers so that I could be approved to access the SDK after a two-day waiting period. Most companies just have a download link. You don’t get to run the emulator locally on your computer, where it could be inspected more thoroughly—instead, it runs remotely on a server in China somewhere, and video of it is streamed to your computer. After we wrote our article, Huawei took down the emulator and blocked “overseas” users from downloading the SDK.<p>Essentially useless for me then.
Fascinating to see how much is 'inspired' by Apple's design and Microsoft's for the document app. I'd feel dirty in so blatantly copying someone else's design, but Huawei doesn't share those concerns. Maybe for good reason.
A shamefully ignorant article that--like many of the comments here--utterly misses the technical value of HarmonyOS, which I was able to glean in 5 minutes from looking at the official documentation.<p>Check out the architecture diagram on this page: <a href="https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-guides/harmonyos-overview-0000000000011903" rel="nofollow">https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu...</a><p>HarmonyOS is evidently not a peer competitor with Android or iOS, but a further abstraction layer above these traditional mobile OS. This is obvious in the fact that HarmonyOS has a "kernel abstraction layer" which supports Linux (Android), LiteOS, etc. The heart of HarmonyOS is not in the particular terminal UI or kernel, but in everything in between--specifically the DSoftBus (from "dbus"?) which ostensibly enables first-class distributed computing across devices.<p>Based on this basic info, HarmonyOS should be viewed more as a "meta OS", which has been bootstrapped by existing OS-as-backend, Android Linux in the context of phones/tablets, but is <i>not strictly dependent</i> on Android Linux.<p>Smearing Huawei for this technical approach is like smearing Python as a "C clone" or Clojure as a "Lisp or JVM clone". It's shamefully ignorant.
> 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.<p>One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?<p>If it is, please call me the creator of RobotOSxxx OS (Which <i>really fuzzwords</i> could not may Android) from now on.
Moving running apps across devices is a big security risk. Look up "Mobile Agent" research on Google Scholar. There are some severe security problems with moving running apps between devices. Foremost is the problem of a compromised host that corrupts the apps and then sends them on their way to attack other devices. It is very difficult to protect your app against a corrupt host operating system. There may be some known solutions to the security problems with mobile agents, but I suspect Huawei spent most of the last two years working on other things instead of rewriting Android from the ground up to provide security for running apps that can jump between devices. Even if they did it is all new and not proven in the field. In fact there is another name for apps that can jump between devices, worms. What a great way for an attacker to spread an infection, worm capability built into the OS! And don't tell me it will all be under user control when the app can popup "click here to listen to your music on your TV!" which is a legitimate reason to allow any app to jump devices.
Huawei has "OS Kernel Lab" in their research division [1] and seems to do real research, including building an OS kernel. I guess they at least tried to ditch Android at a point.<p>I'm not supporting their PR strategy. Just interesting to see where a corporate research goes.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=huawei+OS+Kernel+Lab" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=huawei+OS+Kernel+Lab</a>
Even if we ignore the 'censorship first' idiom.<p>Unlike Microsoft's Fluent, Material U or other UX/UI exploration.<p>This feels like a pale Apple copycat. oddly it'll become even less relevant by next week with Apple showing their newer UI iteration.
>Only Secure Apps Apply<p>>When you enable Pure Mode on HarmonyOS 2, only apps that have undergone the stringent testing for listing in the HUAWEI AppGallery can be installed. And for an even higher layer of security, installed apps are constantly monitored to detect potential risks and security infringements.<p>At least you can turn the BS down on this one unlike iOS.<p>Also that page lagged a bit on my pinephone.
The only possible explanation for the way Huawei design their UI is to try and trick the non tech savvy into thinking they're buying something that runs the same software as Apple products.
> but China doesn't do huge amounts of software development.<p>It’s actually the first time I rethink whether there is a shortage of developers in China or not. Sheer amount there are tons of developers and the tech industry is pretty huge in China. However most are doing “application development”, definitely lacking experts from several fundamental domains (kernel, cloud backbone, etc).<p>Another aspect is they earned much less compared to US though still 1-2x for other type of jobs. However, many senior/principal engineers in FAANG still went back because the scope is substantially larger (you oversee 5-10x more headcount normally)
So when I looked at HarmonyOS when it was announced open source it had nothing to do with Android at all. It was much more Fuchsia like. A modern secure microkernel, message passing and it's own javascript engine, very few drivers. Not exciting, just solid. The total opposite to Android or Samsung.<p><a href="https://gitee.com/openharmony" rel="nofollow">https://gitee.com/openharmony</a><p>This could have been the one renamed to openharmony and LiteOS.
I'm welcoming any competition to the app store duopoly.<p>I'm excited about Ubuntu Touch [1] as well. It's open source and hopefully does integrate well with Ubuntu Desktop. Would like to see a "Ubuntu App Store" as well.<p>[1] <a href="https://ubports.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ubports.com/</a>
related news: <a href="https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2021/6/huawei-launches-products-powered-by-harmonyos-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2021/6/huawei-launches-produc...</a>
Aside from the fact no show case of a phone interface<p>Just from the ars article alone I have extreme doubt of what the phone system(AOSP copy job) on release is the same as the code in open harmony repos
ooh it looks like you can download the sdk from here:
<a href="https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/develop/deveco-studio" rel="nofollow">https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/develop/deveco-studio</a><p>Might give it a spin this weekend.<p>Edit: Locally you can only run project templates that have [Lite] in their name, maybe in the future they will make other simulators available. Signing up for remote emulation is too much of a effort for me.
Seems like an ad paid for by Google, or a very clear example of servilism and bad journalism. If anything "I have no idea what X is" written with such pride as if the job of a "journalist" is not to understand and report stuff
I am wondering if some company official (or perhaps Communist party official) told the team in charge of HarmonyOS you must come up with a completely new OS that is 100% Android compatible, and that is the reason behind this odd strategy
So "Harmony OS" is official, but I don't get it.
- Their watches run a "LiteOS kernel"
- Their tablets and phones run a Linux kernel
- An "open Harmony" project exists with an actual HOS kernel, but doesn't currently run on any devices
- Yet all of these are somehow Harmony OS?