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The new version will not be compatible with Android. Quote: Currently, over 200 HarmonyOS native applications are in development, covering a wide range of comm

The new version will not be compatible with Android. Quote: Currently, over 200 HarmonyOS native applications are in development, covering a wide range of commonly used apps. More than half of China’s Top-200 mobile apps have initiated the development of HarmonyOS native applications. The HarmonyOS developer community is growing rapidly, with over 10,000 new registrations daily. https://sparrowsnews.com/2024/01/18/huawei-harmonyos-next-official-now/ https://sparrowsnews.com/2024/01/18/huawei-harmonyos-next-of...

wkat4242 3y ago
Ah but then how do they fix the app gap (as was my original question) I mean 200 apps are not a lot. Microsoft had a lot more when they cancelled Windows phone. This basically makes it a non starter outside of China. Even there, more than half of the top-200? I doubt that will fly even there. Who wants to buy a phone that can do only half the stuff of everyone else's?
- threeseed 3y ago
  > Who wants to buy a phone that can do only half the stuff of everyone else's At some point there won't be a choice. The real issue will be whether apps like WeChat will be made available on iOS/Android or whether the CCP will force customers abroad to buy Chinese phones in order to use them. That would have major security implications.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    But WeChat is already available on iOS and Android. Or do you mean it would be removed? I wonder if that really matters outside of China though. I don't think anyone outside of China would ever use those.
    - tivert 3y ago
      Tons of people outside of China use WeChat, though they're typically expat Chinese people. Those are people the Chinese government is probably very interested in monitoring.
  - hilbert42 3y ago
    "At some point there won't be a choice." Well, that's the situation with Google isn't it? Every new iteration of Android is more proprietary than the previous one thus more difficult to tailor to one's needs. Leaving aside all Google's spyware issues, since Android 10 just doing basic things on Android such as copying files to my SD card has become essentially impossible. Google's scoped storage is a disaster—designed in the name of security but in practice it's another step by Google to reign in control of the OS. At this rate, it won't be long before users have no control whatsoever over their phones.
- tivert 3y ago
  Microsoft is probably not a good precedent. China an Huawei have far more money, power, and incentive to push a new phone OS than Microsoft ever had. China is a big enough market that it's quite possible that internationalized versions of their indigenous apps could become popular in their own right, and start to make headway in foreign markets. Maybe not in Europe or the US, but perhaps Africa, Latin American, and Asia.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  I think their goal is to slowly migrate their entire stack to something China has full control of, independent of outside influence. That's why it started as a smart underlying layer approach to run Android (something the above article seems to have completely misunderstood) and is now having the Android compatibility layer moved out in this upcoming release. Much easier than trying to replace the world in one shot. From that perspective, it doesn't much matter what a phone with software from the West can do - this is the only phone China has full self reliance and control on.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    It was not a compatibility layer though. It was just Android, as Ars Technica showed. Maybe it became so in later versions but it started as just any other Android skin like "ColorOS" or "EMUI" But yeah if it's only meant for their internal market it could work, as the CCP has the power to force everyone to make apps for it. They'll have to ban sales of foreign brands though.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      It was, Ars just missed where the compatibility layer was as you couldn't see it by booting a smartphone and seeing what it said the kernel was. Harmony splits things up into layers and one thing it provides at the base layer is a KAL to allow for multiple kernels for different devices. The point of allowing swapping the kernel layer for different device types to have different device compatibilities. In the case of phones it meant still being able to load Linux to run an AOSP base and in the case of smartwatches or IoT devices running the LiteOS kernel without AOSP on top. The Huawei specific SDKs target interfaces available in both environments so if you make an app in that ecosystem it'd work on all devices even though the smartphone versions were using Linux+AOSP (because it wasn't ready to replace the entire smartphone stack yet, just the simpler use cases). HarmonyOS NEXT is the version that replaces the whole shebang on all devices. One could simply look at what you see poking around on a smartphone only and conclude that means they are finally doing something different but that explanation highlights the hole from the Ars article - it does nothing to explain other devices or the migration plan to HarmonyOS Next. At the same time it's probably fair to say Ars's other points in the article about Huawei's marketing being a little overdone, their documentation lacking, and the way you registered for it being crazy were still more than valid. They just missed the point of why HarmonyOS was being considered a separate OS due to the limited way they investigated it.

wkat4242 3y ago

Ah but then how do they fix the app gap (as was my original question) I mean 200 apps are not a lot. Microsoft had a lot more when they cancelled Windows phone. This basically makes it a non starter outside of China. Even there, more than half of the top-200? I doubt that will fly even there. Who wants to buy a phone that can do only half the stuff of everyone else's?

threeseed 3y ago
> Who wants to buy a phone that can do only half the stuff of everyone else's At some point there won't be a choice. The real issue will be whether apps like WeChat will be made available on iOS/Android or whether the CCP will force customers abroad to buy Chinese phones in order to use them. That would have major security implications.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  But WeChat is already available on iOS and Android. Or do you mean it would be removed? I wonder if that really matters outside of China though. I don't think anyone outside of China would ever use those.
  - tivert 3y ago
    Tons of people outside of China use WeChat, though they're typically expat Chinese people. Those are people the Chinese government is probably very interested in monitoring.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "At some point there won't be a choice." Well, that's the situation with Google isn't it? Every new iteration of Android is more proprietary than the previous one thus more difficult to tailor to one's needs. Leaving aside all Google's spyware issues, since Android 10 just doing basic things on Android such as copying files to my SD card has become essentially impossible. Google's scoped storage is a disaster—designed in the name of security but in practice it's another step by Google to reign in control of the OS. At this rate, it won't be long before users have no control whatsoever over their phones.
tivert 3y ago
Microsoft is probably not a good precedent. China an Huawei have far more money, power, and incentive to push a new phone OS than Microsoft ever had. China is a big enough market that it's quite possible that internationalized versions of their indigenous apps could become popular in their own right, and start to make headway in foreign markets. Maybe not in Europe or the US, but perhaps Africa, Latin American, and Asia.
zamadatix 3y ago
I think their goal is to slowly migrate their entire stack to something China has full control of, independent of outside influence. That's why it started as a smart underlying layer approach to run Android (something the above article seems to have completely misunderstood) and is now having the Android compatibility layer moved out in this upcoming release. Much easier than trying to replace the world in one shot. From that perspective, it doesn't much matter what a phone with software from the West can do - this is the only phone China has full self reliance and control on.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It was not a compatibility layer though. It was just Android, as Ars Technica showed. Maybe it became so in later versions but it started as just any other Android skin like "ColorOS" or "EMUI" But yeah if it's only meant for their internal market it could work, as the CCP has the power to force everyone to make apps for it. They'll have to ban sales of foreign brands though.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    It was, Ars just missed where the compatibility layer was as you couldn't see it by booting a smartphone and seeing what it said the kernel was. Harmony splits things up into layers and one thing it provides at the base layer is a KAL to allow for multiple kernels for different devices. The point of allowing swapping the kernel layer for different device types to have different device compatibilities. In the case of phones it meant still being able to load Linux to run an AOSP base and in the case of smartwatches or IoT devices running the LiteOS kernel without AOSP on top. The Huawei specific SDKs target interfaces available in both environments so if you make an app in that ecosystem it'd work on all devices even though the smartphone versions were using Linux+AOSP (because it wasn't ready to replace the entire smartphone stack yet, just the simpler use cases). HarmonyOS NEXT is the version that replaces the whole shebang on all devices. One could simply look at what you see poking around on a smartphone only and conclude that means they are finally doing something different but that explanation highlights the hole from the Ars article - it does nothing to explain other devices or the migration plan to HarmonyOS Next. At the same time it's probably fair to say Ars's other points in the article about Huawei's marketing being a little overdone, their documentation lacking, and the way you registered for it being crazy were still more than valid. They just missed the point of why HarmonyOS was being considered a separate OS due to the limited way they investigated it.