Huawei has announced the launch of the first version (beta) of the HarmonyOS NEXT operating system, which was leaked a few months ago. The goal is “break out” of the Android ecosystem or as naysayers would say, the ability to survive outside of a platform that – along with Apple’s iOS – firmly dominates the global mobility market.

The Chinese company has already started testing the system on some of its smartphones and tablets that use its own Kirin and Kunpeng chipsets. It should be said that this is a public beta version, but unlike previous versions of HarmonyOS, the big difference with NEXT is that no longer compatible with Android apps.

HarmonyOS NEXT, Can You Live Without Android?

You already know that the Trump administration blocked Huawei in 2019 while escalating the trade war against China. The White House argued (so far without public evidence) on the grounds of “espionage” and, under the oft-repeated argument of “national security”, prevented US companies from buying telecommunications equipment from Huawei and also banned them from accessing technology from US companies. These restrictions prevented the company from accessing all Google services in the software. with Android or in hardware with Qualcomm chips.

Out of necessity, Huawei created HarmonyOS, an open source operating system based on Android. Now comes another version that aims to be completely independent as it aims to transition your devices to a completely custom operating system. At the moment, the system is only available in China, and there the company does not seem to have a problem not using Android, because the main applications for social networks or e-commerce (Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, JD.com. . . ) is among those that developed native applications for the system. Huawei says it has been launched More than 15,000 native applications and metaservices for HarmonyOS. A significant start, although Google and Apple have quite a few in their app stores.

The Chinese firm says the new operating system has 110 million lines of code and improves the overall performance of mobile devices that use it by up to 30 percent. It’s also optimized to extend battery life by up to 56 minutes and free up an average of 1.5GB of memory for non-OS tasks.

Technically, HarmonyOS NEXT uses an in-house developed microkernel based on the open source OpenHarmony kernel. It is compatible with applications through the Huawei Ark compiler with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and promises a seamless unified architecture between the devices that use it (Huawei’s own), the cloud and connectivity between different formats.

The big question remains the same: Can you survive in Android-less mobility in Western markets so dependent on Google’s system, services and apps? At the moment, HarmonyOS NEXT is only available in China, and we really don’t know if there are plans to launch it internationally. We know that Huawei hopes to bring its operating system to PCs. Last month, the president of the Chinese giant’s consumer group, Yu Chengdong, revealed that it already does They wouldn’t use Windows on their future machines, but Harmony OS.