15 points

I greatly doubt they’ll break android app compatibility. Too many huawei phone users rely on android apps.

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9 points

I imagine their goal is to not be reliant on Google ecosystem though. That means providing their own set of services and their own app store. So, they’d have to go through the exercise of updating existing apps for that. Breaking compatibility might just mean switching out gservices.

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3 points

I use the huawei app gallery rn even on another device, and my huawei watch requires a huawei services background app, similar to google play services.

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3 points

Makes sense, they basically have to go this route because US could force Google to shut down services for Huawei any time.

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They 100% are doing it. It seems a bit crazy and I’m sure there will be virtual environments at launch, but they are breaking compatibility.

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13 points

Xiaomi also released their own fork of Android recently on HyperOS, it is still built on Android AOSP without google elements. Seems like thats the way going forward.

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7 points

I think that’s the most sensible approach, there’s little value in reinventing the wheel here. The main goal is to make sure that the tech stack is owned and manged domestically, so ripping out any Google dependent bits is the key task.

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4 points
*

That’s kind of what almost all android distros are (except that most don’t remove google play services) … samsung’s OneUI, Xiaomi’s current MIUI, Huawei’s HarmonyOS, just skinned AOSP with some added features.

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11 points

This is great progress! IDK if they should take the Apple closed ecosystem route or eventually go open source and compete with Android.

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They took the Google route. There’s OpenHarmony and then there’s HarmonyOS with Huawei branding and services.

I’m not an expert, I learned this off of Wikipedia

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4 points

is it like a fork of android? i assume linux base too?

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That’s where it gets interesting. It uses multiple kernels depending on the version, one of the kernels is Linux but they also have their own kernel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteOS

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10 points

Every time I hear about Huawei advances I get more angry that I live in Canada and am stuck with an iPhone.

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5 points

I’d love to be able to get a Huawei phone here.

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7 points

What exactly is it? They’re shipping Linux laptops now. Is this a Linux phone or does “break from Android” mean “It’s using an Android fork like last year but this year they aren’t mentioning Android in the press release”?

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7 points
*

No, so far as I understand it it’s a separate system that may not be compatible with android. HarmonyOS is intended to be a cross platform operating system from the ground up linking phone, car (electronic vehicles growing exponentially in China), desktop, household electronics, household AI, etc, completely seamlessly. If you aren’t part of that entire ecosystem as Huawei visualize, which is likely the case if you’re not in China, you probably won’t experience the benefit of HarmonyOS, it’ll just be another system running another set of apps. But ppl in China will if it rolls out as intended.

Outside of China, HarmonyOS will probably eventually need to be compatible with Android to be competitive.

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4 points
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And this is a third Harmony OS, separate from their Linux distro and Android version? Because both of those were called Harmony OS too and did iOS style inter-device communication.

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4 points
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K that’s beyond my knowledge level to answer xD I mostly know what Huawei want it to become and how they likely can make it happen compared to Google Home and Apple versions of the same dream but badly realized, give the more friendly environment to Huawei in China, its relationship with more companies and branches of products, and ppl being more used to doing literally everything already via their mobile os and very willing to be even more immersed

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in the the wikipedia article it seems to use multiple kernels (either a rtos type kernel for iot and wearable devices or the linux kernel + aosp layer for phones, tablets, etc…) seems that in the new next version they will no longer use the linux kernel but their own kernel instead and move away from android entirely (i got that last bit from this article)

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4 points

My understanding is that it’s an Android fork, and at this point it’s diverged enough that it doesn’t work with stock Android apps. Another break from Android is that Huawei has their own service ecosystem and app store that’s independent of Google.

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5 points

Okay but doesn’t that necessarily also mean that it doesn’t work with their own back-catalogue of apps? Do Huawei apps still work on Google-Android?

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3 points

Not sure if they do or not, but they could just build two separate versions of the app against different services. So, if you’re publishing to the Google store you use gservices and if you’re publishing to Huawei store then you use Huawei ones. The API could be the same from app’s perspective, so it’d just be a matter of which library you use to talk to the services.

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