Huawei will install its own smartphone operating system in 2021

By Jerom Bolt
Huawei will put its Harmony OS operating system, which the company has been working on for more than a year, on smartphones in 2021, said a director of the Chinese group, which last year sold 240 million smartphones. Huawei has suffered because of US sanctions and can no longer install Android and Google Mobile Services on new phones. The business was also hit by new bans on the purchase of components and software from US companies.
Richard Yu, director of the Consumer division, said that the new operating system will arrive on phones next year. The company has invested several hundred million dollars in the new system and has intensely promoted its own app store. A first version, incipient, was announced a year ago.
The statements were made at the annual developer conference, and the plan is for a beta version of Harmony OS 2.0 to reach application developers in December.
The company says it will open the system to other Chinese phone manufacturers. But it’s hard to believe that Oppo or OnePlus, for example, will give up Android, a system that people have become accustomed to and that has reached maturity for some years, leaving behind the problems of the first versions.
Huawei referred to Harmony OS as a “multi-device” platform for watches, laptops and smartphones and did not present it in official communication as a rival to Android.