The first HarmonyOS-powered phone from Huawei to arrive in 2021

Huawei's HarmonyOS was unveiled last year during the Huawei Developer Conference and there's a report claiming that this year's conference on September 10 will bring the HarmonyOS 2.0. Interestingly, the rumor cites Richard Yu himself, the company's CEO. And the first phone with the in-house operating system will launch as early as next year.

Harmony OS (Chinese: 鸿蒙; pinyin: Hóngméng), styled as HarmonyOS, is an upcoming free, microkernel-based distributed operating system being developed by Huawei. Unveiled on 9 August 2019, the platform is designed primarily for Internet of things (IoT) devices.

History

Reports surrounding an in-house operating system being developed by Huawei date back as far as 2012. They intensified in May 2019 after Huawei was subjected to export restrictions by the United States government for violations of United States sanctions against Iran. Huawei executive Richard Yu described an in-house platform as a "plan B" in case it is prevented from using Android on future smartphone products.

Prior to its unveiling, it was originally speculated to be a mobile operating system that could replace Android on future Huawei devices (in response to financial sanctions imposed on Huawei by the United States government in May 2019), but by July 2019, some Huawei executives were describing Harmony as being an "industrial" embedded operating system designed for IoT hardware, discarding the previous statements for it to be a mobile operating system. These details were confirmed upon the official unveiling of the platform in 2019, with Huawei listing use cases such as smart TVs, in-car entertainment, and wearable devices.

A smartphone running the said OS already exists and will likely hit the market next year along with a number of new devices including PCs, tablets, smart wearables and other IoT products. In fact, the first smartwatch running HarmonyOS is expected to make a debut until the end of this year.