At the 2019 Huawei Developers Conference, Huawei Consumer Business CEO Yu Chengdong officially released HarmonyOS. One year later, the Huawei Developer Conference 2020 is about to kick off. At this conference, HarmonyOS will undoubtedly remain one of the highlights, and this highly anticipated operating system may usher in a new upgrade.
As Huawei said, “In an extraordinary 2020, the Huawei Developer Conference 2020 (Together) will come as scheduled.” Too many unexpected things have happened in 2020. Judging from the many news released so far, both HarmonyOS and Huawei Moblie Services (Huawei Terminal Cloud Services) will usher in new versions and release more potential operating systems and ecological products. It will be the focus of Huawei at this stage.
In the face of pressure, is Huawei ready to shine?
In 2019, Huawei officially launched version 1.0 of HarmonyOS, and then Huawei Honor Smart Screen was equipped with this system and became the first early adopter of smart terminal products. According to Huawei’s consumer business CEO Yu Chengdong at the time, HarmonyOS can open up multiple terminal forms in all scenarios such as smart screens in the future.
In fact, although Yu Chengdong said that Huawei mobile phones can carry HarmonyOS at any time, he did not give a clear timetable. Compared with IoT terminals, the mobile phone operating system and application ecosystem are more mature, and it is more complicated for Huawei to build its own mobile phone HarmonyOS ecosystem.
Take smart screens as an example. Its basic applications mainly include relatively simple scenarios such as video platforms and music platforms. It can be equipped with HarmonyOS first to gradually improve its application ecology; but smart phones are completely different. In addition to audio and video, social and office Scenes such as, payment, maps, etc. need to have a complete ecological construction, otherwise it will be difficult to attract users to use .
This is why Huawei vigorously promotes its Huawei Mobile Services ecosystem. In one year, Huawei concentrated a large number of R&D personnel to promote the iteration of HMS Core. In June of this year, Huawei just launched the HMS Core 5.0 update, adding audio, video, image, graphics engine, computer graphics, augmented reality engine and other service capabilities, and the core capabilities have been further improved.
For Huawei itself, this progress is not unpleasant. However, there is still a long way to go to achieve the goal of being shoulder to shoulder with Google’s Apple ecosystem.
In the current special circumstances, HarmonyOS has become the common expectation of the domestic industry and users, but the ecological construction is not a day’s work, and sufficient time must be left for Huawei.
Is it to catch up on someone else’s track or to overtake another track?
In the past year, Huawei executives have emphasized on different occasions that Huawei HarmonyOS is an operating system that can span all devices. In the future, IoT (Internet of Things) devices can be connected through HarmonyOS. Judging from the current situation, Huawei is steadily advancing the implementation of HarmonyOS on watches/bands, cars, and IoT products in accordance with its previous goals.
At present, the global smartphone market is facing a large growth bottleneck, and IoT has been regarded by many manufacturers as the next growth engine. Compared with smart phones, IoT products have more categories and the number of devices has reached a new level, but IoT products of different manufacturers are difficult to achieve interconnection. This leads to a more fragmented ecosystem of the entire IoT industry.
And does HarmonyOS choose to open up IoT products first, aiming at the 5G/IoT market? This is likely to happen. Based on distributed technology, it can bring mutual assistance between devices, such as sharing the camera and screen of the device; an OS can be flexibly deployed to multiple devices, and it can realize integrated development for multiple terminals.
Taking Huawei PC as an example, it can realize the interconnection and intercommunication between mobile phones and PCs through distributed technology. On Huawei PCs, it can edit documents on mobile phones, answer calls and other operations across screens, and even realize mobile multitasking on PCs. If similar cross-screen collaboration and capability sharing can be achieved on many IoT products in the future, it will greatly change the IoT industry.
At this developer conference, if HarmonyOS launches a new version on watches, car machines and other terminals, the upgraded HarmonyOS may also have new distributed capabilities released, opening up more IoT terminals and capabilities.
The ecological construction of HarmonyOS cannot be achieved by Huawei alone, and the support of partners is indispensable. Take HarmonyOS’s map ecological construction as an example. In April this year, Huawei officially launched an AR map based on Hetu technology, which can realize a centimeter-level 3D map and restore the real world 1:1. However, if these capabilities are to be truly implemented on the user side, they may need to cooperate with corresponding maps and travel service providers to advance.
Yu Chengdong said at the 2019 Developer Conference that HarmonyOS was not actually designed to benchmark Android and iOS, but the next-generation operating system. Compared to just building a mobile operating system, Huawei’s ambitions seem to be greater; on the other hand, Huawei’s strategy is also steady and steady, starting with an embedded system and gradually expanding its ecosystem.
HarmonyOS will play an increasingly important role in the smart all-scenario strategy developed by Huawei. And whether this future plan can be successfully realized, we may be able to get some clearer answers at this year’s developer conference.
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