Huawei has just officially launched HarmonyOS NEXT, its new operating system that is built independently of Android and the Linux kernel. The company aims to transition its current and future devices to the new homegrown OS, with an initial rollout in China before eventually expanding globally.
In case you are unaware, the brand’s current OS, which is HarmonyOS, is built upon the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which is why many Android apps can be sideloaded on Huawei devices. With NEXT, it is based on a custom unified proprietary system built on OpenHarmony and only supports its native apps, with a self-developed Star Shield architecture for security.
The OS will work across a broad range of devices from smartphones to wearables, smart home devices, and car systems, with cloud-based interconnectivity across various form factors. The group’s chairman, Richard Yu, announced that 15,000 apps are already part of the NEXT ecosystem with more on the way.
NEXT introduces a refresh UI with a new lockscreen, customisation options, control centre, and faster animation, along with system-level AI features based on the Pangu large language model. Moreover, the company claims that it will offer a 30% increase in device fluency, 20% lower power consumption, faster file sharing with Share 2.0, with a claim that a 1.2GB file can be transferred between two devices within eight seconds.
The company is currently seeding a public beta of HarmonyOS NEXT in China. For now, it is limited to the Pura 70 series, Pocket 2, and MatePad Pro 11 2024.
(Source: GSMArena)
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