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

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.