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Huawei replaces Android with HarmonyOS, which is also Android
- tvvocold 5y agorelated news: https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2021/6/huawei-launches-products-powered-by-harmonyos-2 https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2021/6/huawei-launches-produc...
- throwaway4good 5y agoSome more hints at what’s in it in the technical release notes: https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/release-notes/openharmony-2-0-canary.md https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/release-no... Looks they have added a new JS UI framework at os level. Probably to replace Android eventually. Going pure JS (rather than Android Java or something else) I think will be a big plus for developer adaption.
- dragonelite 5y agoIf I'm not mistaken java can still be used according to the HarmonyOS developer documentation. Hope they will add a wasm runtime in the future. Might be interesting to see how a third non western eco system will develop over the year. But they should release their sdk in the west soon so people might start tinkering.
- throwaway4good 5y agoThere is some stuff here: https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/tree/master/docker https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/tree/master/docker What exactly is a bit unclear and I don't know why it is inside the docs repository.
- dragonelite 5y agoI just saw they released their SDK and DevEco intellij clone for people outside of China.
- throwaway4good 5y agoI am very curious about their JS based UI framework (that is referenced in their 2.0 canary release notes). Have you seen anything on this? (Examples etc.)
- dragonelite 5y agoI think its described over here in the docs: https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-guides/ui-js-overview-0000000000500376 https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu...
- throwaway4good 5y agoIt appears to be documented here: https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/tree/master/en/application-dev/js-reference https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/tree/master/en/applicatio... Some example code here: https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/application-dev/js-reference/hml.md https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/applicatio... Apparently made very web like with ui layouts described in hml Huawei markup language rather than html. Also lots of low level access - you can query the temperature of the battery via one of the apis.
- _gtly 5y agomore details here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/huaweis-harmonyos-will-rollout-to-100-android-models-over-the-next-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/huaweis-harmonyos-wi...
- dang 5y agoThanks - that seems more informative than the corporate page, so I've switched the URL from https://consumer.huawei.com/en/harmonyos/ https://consumer.huawei.com/en/harmonyos/.
- throwaway4good 5y agoIt is also kinda biased and just stuck at the old this just a copy of Android record. For example the release notes mentions a new JS UI framework at the OS level with the potential to replace Android Java completely. Had Google or Apple done this it would be sitting pretty on the hn front page for days. Here it is just ignored in the politics of Huawei.
- yorwba 5y agoYou could try submitting the documentation/demo page for that new JS UI framework.
- throwaway4good 5y agoI did submit this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378926 Which has some example code - as I understand it the apps will look just like android apps.
- EvilEy3 5y agoFancy! I don't understand who would in their right mind, except for web devs, prefer this to Kotlin + Compose.
- throwaway6421 5y agoJust wanted to point out that this whole ecosystem is built on the principle of "censorship first." If you take a look at the docs [1], you'll notice that they're not hosted on GitHub (which allows content critical of the CCP), but rather on Gitee, which is a Chinese-grown alternative. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you'll see the option "违法和不良信息举报中心": "Control Panel for Reporting Illegal and Harmful Information." Virtually all Chinese apps are designed from the ground-up to support purging information deemed undesirable (there's a great in-depth discussion of this system from someone who worked at 抖音, China's TikTok) [2]. I find it ironic that this new toolkit, designed to entice we software developers onto platforms designed for total Chinese state control, is being released on the eve of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Masacre. The technology may be interesting, but please also consider the baked-in issues around censorship and privacy. [1] https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/release-notes/openharmony-2-0-canary.md https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/release-no... [2] https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-...
- swiley 5y agoThis doesn't sound any worse than iOS. If you're worried about personal computing you can rest assured that it died for the average consumer a decade ago.
- bbarnett 5y agoI believe this is the wrong way to put it. Personal computing never existed for the average consumer. The computing market was filled with hobbiests, specialists, and those needing a computer for some task. EG, authors typing manuscripts (part time work?). Since then, the average consumer bought phones with extra fluff on it. They use it as toys, gimmicky things. During that time of the average consumer buying phones, general purpose computing device use had still grown. It has merely shrunk as the overall percentage of "computing devices owned by people". Nothing has died. General computing device purchasing and usage is at an all time high..
- 5y ago
- swiley 5y ago>Only Secure Apps Apply >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. At least you can turn the BS down on this one unlike iOS. Also that page lagged a bit on my pinephone.
- drcongo 5y agoNo page lag on my kids' iPhone 4s.
- kaba0 5y agoI really love my pinephone, but frankly, what doesn’t lag on it?
- swiley 5y agoHackernews, dino, FVWM, and vim don't.
- 29083011397778 5y agoIf I don't take it slow and give my Pinephone (Community edition with 3 gig of RAM) time to think, I've seen hckrnews crash Firefox on my Pinephone.
- swiley 5y agoTry a good WM like FVWM. Phosh is crazy slow.
- mosselman 5y agoFascinating 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.
- Santosh83 5y agoYeah of course the same way Western world feels "dirty" because they copied Yoga or patented indigenous herbals or any number of other things? Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people? That's how humans have progressed these thousands of years. Not by paranoid, corporate silos and NIH syndrome and draconian patents.
- FrozenSynapse 5y agowtf? How can you copy Yoga?! You can copy a design language tho
- dragonsh 5y agoOh sure a specific set of exercise or regime which has a specific effect on body can be a copyright or patent depending on the media and the way they are presented. Like people talking about Ashtang Vinyasa Yoga, Viniyoga, Kundalini Yoga all can be patented in a specific way e.g. [1], obviously need to pay lawyer fee and go to courts to determine later if it can be used to earn money when other party who need to pay do not agree. It waste resources, hamper growth and dissemination of knowledge. If someone patented the Decimal System or Abacus or Gun powder or Pythogorus Theorem or Fibonnaci Series or Newton patented its laws of motion and anyone using this laws and formula's in any system needs to pay royalty not sure what weird world will be. Human knowledge stand on the giant shoulders of others and patent and copyright with ever-greening and useless litigation are making it hard and difficult. Can't fathom someone can copyright a rectangle drawing and sue phone companies for launching rectangle phones. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8605152 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8605152
- rusk 5y agopwnix
- rock_artist 5y agoEven if we ignore the 'censorship first' idiom. Unlike Microsoft's Fluent, Material U or other UX/UI exploration. This feels like a pale Apple copycat. oddly it'll become even less relevant by next week with Apple showing their newer UI iteration.
- reelbucks 5y agothe world is then left with one single Android smart-phone maker that's not from China and competitive: Samsung.
- juliosueiras 5y agoAside from the fact no show case of a phone interface 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
- flakiness 5y agoHuawei 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. I'm not supporting their PR strategy. Just interesting to see where a corporate research goes. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=huawei+OS+Kernel+Lab https://www.google.com/search?q=huawei+OS+Kernel+Lab
- swiley 5y agoThe Linux kernel is the singular decent component of Android.
- teddyh 5y agoWas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27280567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27280567
- dragonelite 5y agoooh it looks like you can download the sdk from here: https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/develop/deveco-studio https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/develop/deveco-studio Might give it a spin this weekend. 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.
- pmlnr 5y agoThe early MIUIs were something like a perfected iOS "copycat", and they were really nice operating systems. You do all know that traditional chinese/japanese art starts learning by copying for years, right? Different cultures percieve copying at a very different level - deal with it.
- chronogram 5y ago> 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. Essentially useless for me then.
- dragonelite 5y agoNVM theres a big sign on process. https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-guides/software_install-0000001053582415 https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu... It seems there are two emulation environments, one that is remote you need to sign in and verify yourself. The other is your local simulator no need to sign in or verify. The local simulator is only for wearables and cameras, if you want HarmonyOS 2.0 devices you need to use the remote simulator. 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.
- yorwba 5y agoEdit: Parent comment used to say "you can just download the SDK" or something like that. Original response below: -------------------------------------------------------------- From that page: NOTE If you need to use the DevEco Studio emulator, your HUAWEI ID must pass the identity verification by Huawei. It is recommended that you submit your HUAWEI ID for identity verification review immediately after the registration. For details, refer to Identity Verification. The identity verification requirements for individual (not enterprise) developers are here: https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/start/ibca-0000001062388135 https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/start/ibca-0000... HUAWEI Developers supports multiple identity document combinations for verification, including: 1. ID card + bank document 2. Passport + bank document 3. Other supporting documents (such as driver's license) + bank document
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoI appreciate the gesture but app developers in the West are firmly and irrevocably slaves to Google.
- toyg 5y agoI think you'll find it's consumers who are actually slaves to Apple and Google. Developers are not particularly happy to use iOS or Android, there is simply no commercially-viable alternative.
- nirui 5y ago> 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. 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? If it is, please call me the creator of RobotOSxxx OS (Which really fuzzwords could not may Android) from now on.
- vbsteven 5y agoWhy wouldn’t it be legal? As long as the fork complies with all software licenses. This happens all the time by large and small companies, orgs and individuals: Amazons FireOS is an Android fork, Amazons opensearch distro is an elasticsearch fork, LibreOffice is an OpenOffice fork, Mate is Gnome3 fork, Jenkins is a Hudson fork, Google’s blink is a fork of WebKit, etc.
- nirui 5y agoI've been reading Chinese posts on the network, a lots of people are actually debating whether or not the OS is related to (not solidly based on) Android due to the confusion. I'm personally also not sure about the fact too, because there is no source code to confirm that. Based on my understanding of the copyright law and licenses, in addition to keep the same license, the fork must also display/state the original authors in their copyright declarations. There are also implications on the patent front.
- mithusingh32 5y agoI don't think so. But it is a Chinese company so its not the first time where they basically just did a copy and replace. Google doesn't wants to piss off the Chinese govt either by trying to shut down Huawei.
- 5y ago
- dwardu 5y agoLooks like iPadOS to me.
- breakfastduck 5y agoThe 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.
- marderfarker2 5y agoYou underestimate the cognitive ability of the masses. 10/10 of people I know buy for the brand.
- breakfastduck 5y agoWell that's exactly my point. They're entire marketing & product strategy seems to be to convince people their stuff has the same reputation / quality as Apple.
- marderfarker2 5y agoAnd? A brand cannot stand on marketing alone.
- breakfastduck 5y agoAnd what? What point do you think you’re arguing with me about?
- rchaud 5y agoI've bought Huawei phones and tablets in the past. I don't care one whit about the default UI. Samsung's sucked for years before OneUI. LG Mobile (RIP) wasn't good either. The best part of Android is that you can make the interface look however you want.
- breakfastduck 5y agoI mean I just don’t like the practice. Get some originality. I’d be much more concerned about embedded spyware.
- whoevercares 5y ago> but China doesn't do huge amounts of software development. 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). 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)
- ChrisRR 5y agoThis thread is full of suspiciously pro huawei and pro china comments and a lot of legitimate concerns are being downvoted. I've never seen so many grey comments
- jp0d 5y agoTry saying anything against China on this platform and you risk getting flagged and downvoted. I've experienced that already.
- ChrisRR 5y agoEven my own comment got downvoted.
- chalcolithic 5y agoI like to binge read the comment history when I bump into someone interesting on HN (which happens quite often). I've seen a few people very critical of China but admittedly they were not talking about Huawei specifically. Their comment history does not seem to back up your observation. Could it be something more specific than China in general?
- jp0d 5y agoNo. You're right. I'm responsible for my comments and in hindsight a few of those were a bit emotionally driven rather than being objective. But I've been downvoted on my factual comments during Asian business hours and only to rise to positive number the following day during Australian hours. I wasn't trying to see how much karma I'd earned. I just happened to notice this trend on a couple of my comments. It's purely anecdotal and I've no data to prove that it's in fact the general case. I don't know how much fact there is to the Huawei case but the secretive govt that CCP is, I'd be very careful about using their services. I don't want my data ending up in their servers to feed into their algorithms.
- velgewp 5y agoSo "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?
- slver 5y agoBrand names are not a hash on the source code of the kernel, so they can do whatever they want.
- rapjr9 5y agoMoving 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.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoI 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
- lnxg33k1 5y agoSeems 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
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- quambene 5y agoI'm welcoming any competition to the app store duopoly. 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. [1] https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
- pphysch 5y agoA 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. Check out the architecture diagram on this page: https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-guides/harmonyos-overview-0000000000011903 https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu... 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. 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 not strictly dependent on Android Linux. 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.
- emptysongglass 5y agoIf you read the article Ars Technica points out the direct lies Huawei is telling: "no single line of code is identical to that of Android," and in the linked original piece of reporting, "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei's top brass doesn't appear to value truthfully disclosing either the provenance of its software or what it actually is so why should I bother with it?
- pphysch 5y agoThis is likely taken out of context or a misunderstanding. Or are you implying that DSoftBus, KAS were somehow lifted from Android even though they are kernel agnostic?
- rurban 5y agoSo 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. https://gitee.com/openharmony https://gitee.com/openharmony This could have been the one renamed to openharmony and LiteOS.