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HarmonyOS is Huawei’s Android alternative for smartphones and smart home devices
- paulriddle 7y agoThere is a related thread with some discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20651984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20651984
- baybal2 7y agoSo, they finally decided that the connotation is "tricky" with Hongmen. The transliteration in Pinyin sound close to informal name for black societies. The "Secret Society OS" is not the best pick for an OS name when things happen in Hongkong.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoYour comment is not at all clear; perhaps you could try being less euphemistic and say what it is you mean.
- navigaid 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiandihui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiandihui According to wikipedia, 洪門(Hongmen) is the alternative name for Tiandihui(天地會), an illegal society in Hong Kong, which sounds similar to Hongmeng.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoAh, so "black societies" meant something like "criminal organisations", maybe triads? I thought to begin with the comment meant dark-skinned people. So, if I have it right: Originally Huawei called their OS 'Hongmeng'. But that sounds like 'Hongmen' which is an alternative name used (but not exclusively) for the outlawed Tiandihui crime syndicate. something close to that.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoLooks like it was originally this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Meng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Meng but it could easily be punned as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongmen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongmen Neither are especially auspicious, it seems! But perhaps the first one was intended as "oh hai plz do not use unfinished OS".
- mytailorisrich 7y agoIt's still called Hongmeng in Chinese, though (as per article's picture). No-one in the west knows about black societies and no-one ever heard that word. I think this is about having an 'international' name that does not sound too foreign/Chinese and that is not opened to misinformation campaigns.
- 07d046 7y agoI recognize the term "Hongmen", although I'm sure I'm not representative of most people. It's probably not in Huawei's interests to have an operating system colloquially known as Triad OS.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoI dunno, it has a certain kung fu movie cachet.
- jimmydef 7y agoNo native Chinese speaker will mistake 鸿蒙 (Hong Meng) for 洪门(Hong men) . And no Non Chinese speaker will even know what is HongMen. Don't know where you're going with this.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoYeah right up until someone does the OS-tan caricature for Hong Meng as a cute gangster.
- baybal2 7y agoSure, the thing is much more about the part of population with richer imagination. I myself could not have imagined character 貓 being censored because of another "Mao"
- 07d046 7y agoThe other problem is that "Hongmeng" literally means "Red dream", which isn't ideal for a company that wants people to believe it isn't controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoI can’t think of anything I want less than Huawei smart home devices.
- andwaal 7y agoGoogle smart home devices?
- giancarlostoro 7y agoOr a Facebook smart home device. Worse yet that bedroom webcam from Amazon. Idek who approved that.
- repesorsa666 7y agoI hope you are joking. The worst things Google would do are million times less worse than least worst things Huawei has done or would do.
- emptyfile 7y ago[citation needed]
- nailer 7y agoGoogle is beholden to the US government, which does terrible things but generally tries to avoid doing them to US citizens en masse. Huawei is beholden to the Chinese government which has happily mown Chinese citizens down with machine guns.
- krageon 7y agoIt's worth remembering that the world isn't divided into the US and China. There are in fact other countries, and the fact that the US is willing to violate the rights of the people in those countries on a massive scale and subsequently use that against them (which is an even more important factor) means that there is no moral high ground to be found there.
- achow 7y agoThe Huawei CEO said HarmonyOS can replace Android on its smartphones “at any time,” but reiterated its previous commitments to Google’s platform. https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-harmonyos-1017511/ https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-harmonyos-1017511/
- HugoDaniel 7y agoIsn't that a condom brand ?
- Roritharr 7y agoIn the Engadget article it was stated that: "Huawei claims that Harmony OS' IPC performance is five times that of Google's Fuchsia, and three times that of QNX." Which I find fascinating. If they were building this as a Fuchsia competitor and are forced now to push it to market we could see rapid innovation on both sides of the divide actually coming to market soon!
- snvzz 7y agoMaybe they're using seL4? I do not know of their design, but I know some helenos devs are involved, so it's sure to be a proper microkernel multiserver system.
- sideeffffect 7y agoif it's based on seL4, which is licensed undel GPLv2, that we should be able to get our hands on the source code! yay!
- snvzz 7y agoHow so? seL4 is just the kernel. Linux can have software with a range of licenses in userspace, so can seL4. A system based on seL4 would be built as a bunch of services running under seL4, rather than by modifying seL4.
- pjmlp 7y agoHuawei has done several sessions at FOSDEM regarding their microkernels research. They are at it for a long time already.
- AFascistWorld 7y agoWarning everytime you send or browse unharmonious messages, reapeated offenders will have their phones bricked, as this will be the most voted feature on Weibo./s Stating that this is not for smartphones just days ago, now they decided fuck it why not?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 7y ago> The availability of the mobile operating system, which is open source Where is the source?
- bjoko 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652966
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- illuminati1911 7y agoThere is nothing available yet if there even is any source or OS in the first place. "Harmony OS will not allow for root access, which Huawei says is a security risk on Android and other Linux-based operating systems. Finally, Huawei will be open-sourcing Harmony OS in the future."
- vanderZwan 7y ago> Yu claimed, without offering any actual proofs, that HarmonyOS is “more powerful and secure than Android.” “Can it be installed on smartphones? Of course.” This immediately made me wonder if I have ever seen "without offering any actual proofs" added as a qualifier to any of the press statements of Apple, Microsoft or Google. Don't get me wrong, that kind of skepticism is good. It just feels naive and tribal to limit it to the Chinese companies.
- illuminati1911 7y agoI believe those 3 companies have shown and demonstrated their competence and ability to deliver world class software. Huawei has not, at least yet. Whether that will ever happen remains to be seen.
- switch007 7y agoAnd one of those companies let you log in to root with an empty password, very recently. The scepticism should apply across the board
- cojxd 7y agoHaving a bug != being unable to deliver software
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoHaving a bug != having a bug
- illuminati1911 7y agoCherry-picked anecdote doesn't change anything though. Skepticism applies to everyone, but more to companies (as well as individuals) that still haven't proven themselves. Edit: To close04: No one, but you ever talked about Cisco.
- 7y ago
- NiekvdMaas 7y agoA link with much more technical details: https://www.xda-developers.com/harmony-os-huawei-announce/ https://www.xda-developers.com/harmony-os-huawei-announce/
- chvid 7y agoThere is also a youtube video from the Huawei developer conference featuring a series of demos and technical presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fILSSiZVQ3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fILSSiZVQ3M
- chvid 7y agoI have just being viewing the video for a bit (it is over 4 hours) and the Chinese translator is a bit hard to listen to. There seems to be quite few substantial announcements there. Amongst other a new CPU with a redesigned pipeline.
- jotm 7y agoWell, it's the app selection that makes an OS, so if HarmonyOS can't run Android apps, it's doomed. Even if Huawei dumps money into developers (Microsoft tried that with Windows Phone).
- k_sze 7y agoSince nobody has pointed it out yet, harmony = 和諧, which is a euphemism for censorship in China. And then there is 和諧 = 河蟹, which is an atonal homophonic euphemism for the euphemism.
- Max_Mustermann 7y agoCould you explain a bit more about the atonal euphemism? Is this a common alternative to express a word in Mandarin?
- RockmanX 7y agoThe atonal euphemism is a common alternative to avoid automatic censorship of various websites.
- k_sze 7y agoExactly. It’s a tongue-in-cheek that basically says that you need to circumvent censorship when you want to talk about censorship. By the way, I’m not a linguist and I just completely made up that usage of “atonal homophone”. Could an actual linguist chime in and tell us what’s the correct way to describe a “homophone” that doesn’t match in tone, in the context of a tonal language like Chinese?
- gok 7y agoIt's usually still called a pun or homophone. Most puns in English don't precisely match phonetics (especially stress) either.
- HuShifang 7y agoIt's a common way of getting around censorship (specifically taboo words). A classic (if recent), comedic example is the Grass Mud Horse [1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse
- yorwba 7y ago
- Theodores 7y agoAs an English speaking person I have a vested interest in operating systems that are in English. If Harmony OS takes over then I doubt the finer points of the documentation will necessarily be in English. I know there are many strong opinions on everything to do with China, but if English is no longer the lingua-franca in tech then I will be blaming the Trump regime and the three letter agencies for messing it up.
- pjmlp 7y agoEven in IT, in certain world regions you would have better luck with some variation of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian as Lingua Franca than English.
- krageon 7y agoMost of the IT infrastructure most people would use at any point will have documentation in English. I'm sure you could find isolated examples to the contrary and no doubt those examples are sometimes also great software worth using, but this is currently not the norm.
- pjmlp 7y agoThen I have to tell you that in quite a few projects, the skill that the clients were looking for was that besides my programming skills, I also master a couple of human languages. No documentation, comments written in native language and even identifiers are not so uncommon across many corporations.
- krageon 7y agoI never claimed otherwise, I said that this could be the case.
- Theodores 7y agoI would prefer to do things like getting my web server to work in stock Ubuntu where the instructions are all in English. To further help, everything on Stack Overflow is in English. Harmony OS is a general purpose OS, I doubt that if I was trying to get the server version of it working that the finer points of the settings would be documented in English. On-going development might not be in English. The commands used in programming languages are in English. 'strpos' might not be an English Word but it is still English. There isn't a Spanish/Russian/French or other language version of 'strpos'. Same with HTML. 'body' is always 'body' whatever the language the content of the page is. I don't get your point.
- rgrieselhuber 7y agoWhat could go wrong?
- lota-putty 7y agoMarket monopoly is bad for the market's harmony. Two non-colluding competitors are better than a monopoly; three better than two. Hypothesis: Anything more than a 33% market capture by a producer is bad for consumers eventually.
- rqs 7y agoBefore somebody show me the code or even just few screenshots other than https://www.huaweiupdate.com/screenshots-of-ark-os-the-new-huawei-os/ https://www.huaweiupdate.com/screenshots-of-ark-os-the-new-h..., I'm going to assume this OS is based on Microsoft PowerPoint. I been watch related news since the first broke out, but I noticed all the news was just like "OakOS will be a better OS", "Hongmeng OS will be the Android killer", " HarmonyOS will be an alternative OS that can run on anything". "Will be" is a very empty word, and I want to see the real info.
- pjmlp 7y agoSearch FOSDEM talks from Huawei. Most likely it is based on the work they have been showing there the last couple of years.
- f00zz 7y agoJust did and found a talk by a Huawei researcher about optimizing CPU designs for certain OS operations (instead of the other way around). Pretty interesting, thank you.
- toxik 7y agoHuawei has stolen technology from its Western competitors on multiple occasions so I would not be surprised if they just stole most of Android and said neener neener state-sponsored anticompetition
- bad_user 7y agoGiven AOSP, the core of Android, is open source, which is what allows forks to exist, including Amazon's, what's the point in "stealing" from Android when they can just use it legally? Google's grip on Android is via Google Play. Replace Play with your own store, replace Google's proprietary stuff (email, maps, notifications) and you've got a ready to use fork. It's really not that complicated for a big company. All smartphone vendors could do it, except none of them have the capacity to recreate Google's ecosystem that's being controlled via Play. It's why Windows Phone was a complete failure. Think about that for a second. If Microsoft couldn't bootstrap an app ecosystem, most companies don't have any chance. And I'm sure Huawei could, but will it take off outside of China? I doubt it.
- 07d046 7y agoThere's also a bit of discussion on the link I posted, which got enough points but never made it to the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20651984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20651984
- vgoh1 7y agoI don't believe for a second that buying a phone installed with HarmonyOS will ever be compelling to consumers. This is microkernel based, which makes me believe that it's not an AOSP fork, which means having compatibility with Android apps is not going to be straightforward. Think of the problems that Amazon has had filling their app stores with quality ports, and they are only selling tablets now because they are nearly giving them away for free, and also have tight integration with Amazon services, which some people like. PurityOS has a slight chance, but only if they can make it work within the niche audience that they are targeting. Microsoft couldn't make a phone OS work. Firefox couldn't make a phone OS work. It takes years to develop a catalog of apps. If Huawei were truly to be using this as a backup, they would need to start working on getting developers on their platform yesterday, not "in the future".
- addicted 7y agoHarmonyOS, if it is a decent OS, which is a huge IF, will have the advantage of having a huge and fairly receptive Chinese market. It better be open source at least if it wants to have any chance of being used outside China though, and not just “open” source.
- bad_user 7y ago> “open” source Not sure what that means, but open source is pretty much irrelevant in this market, for one because we already have Android and it doesn't help much. If you want to fork Android, it's easy and except for Google's proprietary services, like the notifications, you get compatibility with the entire Android ecosystem out of the box. So why is there no successful fork around, except for Amazon's, which is very niche and doesn't count? Open source is defined by the freedom to fork. However if the market forces are such that forking isn't feasible, then the open source nature is irrelevant. Going back to your usage of quotes in "open" source, if that's what you meant, well, unfortunately Huawei is not the FSF.
- LaserToy 7y agoI would say, their source code should be available for anyone to see, especially security researches. And what is installed on the phone should be exactly what is available in public.
- turbinerneiter 7y agoSo, was anybody able to find some source code for this allegedly Open Source OS or the allegedly Open Source ARK compiler?
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoWhich open source license requires them to release the code before the product is even released?
- turbinerneiter 7y agoFair enough regarding Harmony, but what is up with ARK? Check out this Google Search: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&channel=trow&q=ark+compiler https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&channel=tro... Pages upon pages parroting the Open Source claim, bot not a single line of code in sight. Ma issue here is with these news outlets parroting the Open Source claims. Your stuff isn't Open Source until the sources are open.
- dleslie 7y agoI think I found it. https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/ArkCompiler.html https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/ArkCompiler.htm...
- turbinerneiter 7y agoThis page 404s :D
- yorwba 7y agoArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20190805092033/https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/ArkCompiler.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190805092033/https://www.huawe...
- tobiasu 7y ago
- phantom_oracle 7y agoAt the time of writing, it has only implicitly been mentioned in the comments here about the security risks this OS might have. We know that Google has a very close relationship to the US government w.r.t surveillance. Apple claims to be "fighting" it, whether as PR or genuine. Huawei on the other hand is deeply intertwined with the Chinese government and their policies should give an indication that backdoors and total surveillance will be passed into the OS. I don't see this OS succeeding beyond China though. US companies still dominate the app market outside China. No WhatsApp = no thanks; to the majority of the developing world.
- metachris 7y agoThe Chinese government can force cooperation from any company operating in China for any kind of data access, without court ruling or any due process. This basically means the Chinese government will have direct data access to phones running Huawei's OS. See also https://www.ft.com/content/282f8ca0-3be6-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0 https://www.ft.com/content/282f8ca0-3be6-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca...
- ebog 7y ago> I don't see this OS succeeding beyond China though. I wouldn't be so sure. Obviously it would be an uphill battle for the OS to compete in the US or Europe, but anywhere that doesn't have clear smartphone dominance yet (ie most of India or Africa) is fair game. Huawei already has a strong foothold in both of those places, and the Chinese government is not opposed to strong-arming them into sticking with Huawei infrastructure.
- tsunamifury 7y agoWe know that Google has a very close relationship to the US government w.r.t surveillance. [Citation needed]
- xvilka 7y agoHopefully, they will rewrite it in Rust.
- xbeta 7y agoGiven that it is an OS from a China-fund company, I would hesitate to use it as much as I can away from surveillance. It is almost guarantee that backdoor will be there.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoIf you are using a smartphone, assume most nation states can hack you if they're particularly inclined. If you want not to be hacked, use a dumbphone and take the battery and SIM out and bin it after use.
- deadbunny 7y agoCan't see them collecting much more than google do. One has more influence over my life, the other is China.
- apta 7y agoWe see what China is doing to its Muslim minorities. Having a government like that gain insight into the habits of people of other countries is probably not the best idea.
- privateprofile 7y agoSimilar to what they do with/in Tibet: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16689779 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16689779
- scriptproof 7y agoWe see what Muslim is doing to its China minorities.
- ETHisso2017 7y agoIsn't it open-source, though?
- stevefan1999 7y agoIt is impossible to have backdoors in open source software
- api 7y agoJust what I want, a phone OS from a less privacy conscious company (China, Inc.) than Google.
- Nexusone 7y agoHackernews is full of prejudice against Chinese things.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoHacker news has 173 comments right now and my rough estimate is %20 are anti-China without contributing anything new to the conversation. The original article on Tech Crunch has 5 comments and 80% of them are prejudiced against China with some slipping into racist territory. So I would say that Hackernews lifts significantly out of the general cesspool that is internet comments.
- chadmeister 7y agoYup, because there certainly isn't anything to worry about when it comes to China further globalizing it's surveillance tech. Anyone disagreeing is just racialist!
- me551ah 7y agoIt doesn't matter if it's faster or has more features, it is hard to get a foothold in the Smartphone market. Windows Phone was better than Android IMO, it had a much cleaner UI ( Compared to Android 2.3), better battery management and was much easier to develop. But at the end of the day , developers just did not write apps for it. HarmonyOS will end up in the same boat. Devs won't write apps for HarmonyOS because it wouldn't have users and users wouldn't buy Huawei because it doesn't have apps. It's a chicken and egg problem which is really hard to solve.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- einpoklum 7y ago> The top executive also claimed that HarmonyOS’ microkernel has “one-thousandth the amount of code in the Linux kernel.” Wow, really? A microkernel with a lot less code then a macrokernel? I'm amazed! Seriously, though, this is the writing of a clueless reporter with no editing. Obviously, that executive was simply _explanining_ that the microkernel is small. Other than that - it would be nice if HarmonyOS were to become a properly FOSS OS which can be relatively easily installed on phones with Android (Huawey or otherwise).