During his keynote at the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC) 2020 today, the CEO of Consumer Business Group for Huawei, Richard Yu has hinted that smartphones equipped with Huawei’s in-house operating system, HarmonyOS may appear in the market in 2021.
Prior to that remark, Richard has announced that the beta version of HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK for smartphones will be released in December this year. The SDK is already available for smartwatch, smart TV, and automotive head unit from today onwards.
The CEO has also talked about the OpenHarmony (OH) project which is the open-source version of HarmonyOS, similar in nature to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Available from today onwards, the initial OH deployment can only be done on devices with RAM of up to 128MB RAM but the company already planned to further increase OH’s capability to support devices with more than 4GB of RAM by October 2021.
Given the timeline above, it seems that Android will continue to power Huawei’s smartphones for the time being. This is despite the fact that the company is facing intensifying difficulties to operate as it gets nearer to the deadline of the US sanction on 15 September.
