Huawei has announced its new smartphones, the general Mate 70 series or the foldable X6. And its biggest news is not in the hardware, but in the HarmonyOS Next operating system, which is installed on Huawei mobile phones for the first time. without any dependency on Google’s Android services and without running Android apps.

This is Huawei’s response to Trump’s 2019 blockade, a consequence of the escalation of the trade war against China. The White House thus banned Huawei from accessing the technologies of American companies and prevented it from using the Google ecosystem in software or Qualcomm chips in the hardware it also used.

HarmonyOS NEXT Goodbye Android!

Few thought Huawei could survive without its huge reliance on Android. But if there is anyone who could have achieved this, it was the Chinese giant. And it’s achieving it, but not without a brutal decline in sales and revenue in recent years, when it was poised to overtake Samsung and Apple as the leader of the mobile market.

Huawei made a virtue out of necessity and created HarmonyOS, an open-source operating system that was originally based on the Android transition. But the goal was different. Achieve a completely independent software ecosystem. The beta version of HarmonyOS NEXT was introduced a few months ago and now the final version installed on the Mate 70 series has arrived.

Technically, the operating system uses a a 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 company has promised that its system (with 110 million lines of code) will improve (over Android) the overall performance of mobile devices that use it by up to 30 percent. It is also optimized to increase battery life and free up memory for non-OS tasks.

The most important thing, taking into account the importance of applications and digital stores, is that Huawei has already launched more than 15,000 native applications and metaservices for HarmonyOS. In China, its main market, major social networking or e-commerce applications (Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, JD.com…) are among those that have developed native applications for the system.

Of course, the big question remains whether HarmonyOS NEXT will eventually convince users in Western markets. Currently, the Mate 7 and