4 ms·

> Huawei did try to export the last version of the OS – and even offered assistance to developers who coded for the platform and targeted offshore markets – wit

by csomar 2y ago

> Huawei did try to export the last version of the OS – and even offered assistance to developers who coded for the platform and targeted offshore markets – without success. I wonder if they really tried or if they just suck too much. I thought about getting invested into the eco-system. The technical details of NEXT are quite interesting; however, the on-boarding is literal garbage. I still, to this day, can't sign up for a Huawei ID and I am currently located in Asia.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
You can really see Huawei’s roots as a telecom vendor here. Their hardware, firmware, and core parts of the software are nearly flawless, at least compared to Apple/Google in 2024, but the moment you need something beyond the shipped product it becomes a hoop jumping exercise. And the documentation is much worse.
- csomar 2y ago
  Indeed. I don't have much technical expertise in the kernel/OS space, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. On the other hand, their dev experience is akin to opening a router paper manual. There is an opportunity here but I am not sure how it can be unlocked.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    > I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if it's full of shortcuts with privilege escalations or contradicting exceptions. Not because it's Huawei, but because it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in. When it comes to meeting a production deadline of a product, the pressure to apply a quick workaround is much much higher than the pressure to follow a structured process from whatever platform-team. Source: I worked in lots of companies which at some point tried to establish various kinds of frameworks, just to be forced to break them again in order to ship on-time...
    - forgotpwd16 2y ago
      >it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in That's what Apple has been doing for nearly 20 years now.
      - nar001 2y ago
        Sure but they've had time to refine theirs, and MacOS is based on MACH/XNU and OpenBSD, Huawei HarmonyOS NEXT is apparently fully new, so lots of ways things could go wrong
      - rickdeckard 2y ago
        Yes, with a very limited portfolio and mainly shipping to end-users, after breaking compatibility on every major release for 20 years before that. --- If you expect that Huawei will: delay a million-device mass-production for i.e. China Mobile because the project-team needs to wait for the platform-division to implement a fix in their common core and complete the entire release-process, for the project-team to then merge their code again on-top of this new release and start retesting the impact of all the other patches, -> instead of: the project-team just patching their fork of the platform, release a new build for China Mobile immediately and take a note to "deal with this later" then you have not seen the reality of this industry yet. Even Huawei's existing products are a multitude of forked and re-forked codebases with changes left and right, updated/outdated libraries and ever-pending merge-tasks. I don't expect this to suddenly change now
  - GTP 2y ago
    But, do we somehow know that it isn't based on Linux? The fact alone that it will not run Android apps doesn't bar that.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      From what I’ve heard it’s a much smaller microkernel, so it’s improbable for it to be based on Linux.
    - ladyanita22 2y ago
      I can only say that, going through the filesystem of the emulator, I saw a .so for SELinux, which makes me extremely suspicious
markus_zhang 2y ago
Huawei or other Chinese companies are not particularly good at developer support. Maybe it's cultural or large corp or both. I have heard some bad stories about Ali cloud too. They are usable, but not particularly easy to use.
- lemper 2y ago
  in agreement bro. their ECS equivalent's pages are still in hanzhi making it quite a pain to use.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    Yeah they don't care too much about developer experience.

by csomar 2y ago

MichaelZuo 2y ago

You can really see Huawei’s roots as a telecom vendor here. Their hardware, firmware, and core parts of the software are nearly flawless, at least compared to Apple/Google in 2024, but the moment you need something beyond the shipped product it becomes a hoop jumping exercise. And the documentation is much worse.

csomar 2y ago
Indeed. I don't have much technical expertise in the kernel/OS space, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. On the other hand, their dev experience is akin to opening a router paper manual. There is an opportunity here but I am not sure how it can be unlocked.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if it's full of shortcuts with privilege escalations or contradicting exceptions. Not because it's Huawei, but because it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in. When it comes to meeting a production deadline of a product, the pressure to apply a quick workaround is much much higher than the pressure to follow a structured process from whatever platform-team. Source: I worked in lots of companies which at some point tried to establish various kinds of frameworks, just to be forced to break them again in order to ship on-time...
  - forgotpwd16 2y ago
    >it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in That's what Apple has been doing for nearly 20 years now.
    - nar001 2y ago
      Sure but they've had time to refine theirs, and MacOS is based on MACH/XNU and OpenBSD, Huawei HarmonyOS NEXT is apparently fully new, so lots of ways things could go wrong
    - rickdeckard 2y ago
      Yes, with a very limited portfolio and mainly shipping to end-users, after breaking compatibility on every major release for 20 years before that. --- If you expect that Huawei will: delay a million-device mass-production for i.e. China Mobile because the project-team needs to wait for the platform-division to implement a fix in their common core and complete the entire release-process, for the project-team to then merge their code again on-top of this new release and start retesting the impact of all the other patches, -> instead of: the project-team just patching their fork of the platform, release a new build for China Mobile immediately and take a note to "deal with this later" then you have not seen the reality of this industry yet. Even Huawei's existing products are a multitude of forked and re-forked codebases with changes left and right, updated/outdated libraries and ever-pending merge-tasks. I don't expect this to suddenly change now
- GTP 2y ago
  But, do we somehow know that it isn't based on Linux? The fact alone that it will not run Android apps doesn't bar that.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    From what I’ve heard it’s a much smaller microkernel, so it’s improbable for it to be based on Linux.
  - ladyanita22 2y ago
    I can only say that, going through the filesystem of the emulator, I saw a .so for SELinux, which makes me extremely suspicious

markus_zhang 2y ago

Huawei or other Chinese companies are not particularly good at developer support. Maybe it's cultural or large corp or both. I have heard some bad stories about Ali cloud too. They are usable, but not particularly easy to use.

lemper 2y ago
in agreement bro. their ECS equivalent's pages are still in hanzhi making it quite a pain to use.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  Yeah they don't care too much about developer experience.