Every reporter: Wang Jing Every editor: Liang Xiao
Huawei is accelerating the pace of HarmonyOS 2 landing. Today (June 2) evening, at the HarmonyOS 2 and Huawei full-scene new product launch conference, Huawei officially released a number of new products equipped with HarmonyOS 2, including the new version of the HUAWEI Mate 40 series, the new version of the Mate X2, and the HUAWEI WATCH 3 series. , HUAWEI MatePad Pro and other mobile phones, smart watches, tablet products. At the same time, Huawei plans to realize that hundreds of devices can be upgraded to HarmonyOS 2 in the first half of next year.
The tortuous experience of gradually turning from the “spare tire” to the positive has made HarmonyOS shoulder a special mission as soon as it appeared in the public eye. Chinese people also have high hopes for seeing a domestic mobile operating system. Huawei’s executive director and CEO of Consumer Business, Yu Chengdong, said at the press conference: “In the era of the Internet of Everything, no one will be an island. Every person and every device is part of the Internet of Everything. We hope to cooperate with more partners and develop Together, we will prosper the Hongmeng ecology and provide global consumers with better experiences, better products, and better services.”
Yu Chengdong said: “Huawei will use HarmonyOS to help hardware manufacturers upgrade their smart industries, help application manufacturers get more traffic access to other smart hardware other than mobile phones, and help the entire industry with smart upgrades and digital transformation.”
However, in the face of a long-established mobile operating system pattern, HarmonyOS needs to challenge not only Android and iOS, two peaks that have been monopolized in the industry for many years, but the ecological construction is more difficult and cannot be accomplished overnight. How to make consumers accept the new system in a short time? How to attract more application developers? HarmonyOS still has a long way to go.
HarmonyOS is not a substitute for Android and iOS
As a control program that coordinates, manages, and controls computer hardware resources and software resources, the development technology of operating systems is extremely complex, requiring huge R&D investment and a complete ecological layout.
Thirty years ago, the Windows operating system represented by Microsoft Windows was released, allowing personal computers to enter thousands of households, opening the era of personal computers; Under the environment, Microsoft’s Windows mobile and Nokia’s Symbian system have disappeared from the public eye, replaced by Android and iOS. West China Securities Research News quoted IDC data showing that as of 2020, Android and iOS accounted for 88.9% and 11.1% of China’s mobile phone system market share, respectively.
In recent years, with the rapid development of IoT devices such as tablets, watches, and wearable devices, smart phones will no longer be the only smart terminals for consumers. According to the data of the “Research Report on the Operation Status and Development Strategy of China’s Internet of Things Industry for 2020-2026” released by Zhiyan Consulting, the number of global Internet of Things devices has grown rapidly from 2010 to 2018, with a compound growth rate of 20.9%. It is expected that the Internet of Things will be connected in 2022. The scale will reach 7 billion, and the number of global IoT devices (including cellular and non-cellular) networked devices will reach 25.2 billion in 2025.
With the advent of the era of the Internet of Everything, various IoT devices will have more diverse forms, and at the same time, the development of various smart terminal device OSs and the ecological collaborative work in a fragmented state are also very huge and complex.
In addition, many IoT devices have very small memory, while traditional mobile phone operating systems using macro-kernel architecture have a huge kernel. According to data from the Huawei Developer Conference, the Android operating system has more than 100 million lines of code, of which the kernel code exceeds 20 million lines. Android phones need at least 3GB of RAM to run smoothly. This means that mobile operating systems represented by Android and iOS are not well adapted to the operating environment of IoT devices, and the characteristics of distributed and microkernel make HarmonyOS better able to adapt to the needs of the Internet of Everything.
Image source: Huawei official website
Although HarmonyOS has been compared with Android/iOS since its release, with the gradual unveiling of the mystery, the outside world has realized that HarmonyOS is actually a mobile phone operation that connects cars, smart speakers, wearables, and home appliances. Distributed operating system for other devices.
For consumers, HarmonyOS uses a unified software system to fundamentally solve the problem of consumer experience fragmentation facing a large number of smart terminals, and bring consumers a unified, convenient and safe intelligent full-scene experience; for developers In other words, HarmonyOS integrates different terminal hardware capabilities through a variety of distributed technologies to form a virtual “super terminal”. Application developers can develop applications based on the hyper terminal and focus on the upper-level business logic without paying attention to hardware differences. Device developers can do as needed. Call other terminal capabilities to bring innovative service experience based on “super terminal”.
Unlike iOS and Android for mobile phone operating systems, HarmonyOS is a future-oriented full-scene distributed smart operating system. Based on the traditional single-device system capabilities, it proposes a distributed concept based on the same set of system capabilities and adapting to multiple terminal forms. It can merge multiple physically separated devices into a “super terminal”. Invoke and combine the software and hardware capabilities of different devices on demand to bring users a smart experience that is most suitable for the scene in which they are located. Even if the user switches scenes, the smart experience can be migrated across terminals. This shows that HarmonyOS is not a substitute for Android or iOS.
The “Daily Economic News” reporter noted that in order to accelerate the promotion of HarmonyOS, Huawei has donated all the core basic capabilities of the smart terminal operating system to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation in 2020 and 2021, which is funded by the Open Atom Open Source Fund. The contributions of other participants will be integrated to form the OpenHarmony open source project.
It is understood that the Open Atom Open Source Foundation is China’s first open source software foundation and a global non-profit charity organization dedicated to the open source industry. Together with the Linux Foundation, OpenStack Foundation, and Apache Foundation, it forms the world’s four largest open source projects. foundation. The business scope of the Open Atom Open Source Foundation includes open source software, open source hardware, open source chips, and open source content. It provides neutral intellectual property custody services for various open source projects, as well as strategic consulting, legal consulting, project operations and brand marketing services.
Looking at the world, in addition to Huawei, Google and Apple have also proposed corresponding solutions for the Internet of Everything. Among them, the open source operating system developed by Google is called Fuchsia, which is different from the Linux kernel used by Android. It uses Google’s new microkernel Zircon, which can be adapted to various hardware terminals. In the microkernel system, only the most basic scheduling, memory management, driver, file system, etc. of the kernel are implemented by the user-mode daemon. Its advantage is that it is super stable and does not require high memory size and chip performance. Everbright Securities pointed out in a research report, “The microkernel architecture adopted by Fuchsia points out the direction for the future development of the entire operating system, but it is not a distributed design (causing) that the performance is not good enough.”
At the end of 2020, Apple launched its self-developed M1 chip. For Apple, the important significance of M1 is to integrate the content ecology of different devices in the future. Through the M1 chip, Apple successfully opened up the hardware ecosystem from mobile phones to tablet computers to desktop computing within half a year. Regardless of the competitiveness of hardware products or the development space of Internet service business, the powerful capabilities of the M1 chip have become Apple’s latest moat. And this moat may also allow Apple to open up a new developer ecosystem in the AIoT field that may be comparable to the App Store.
Mass ecology is the core of the operating system
As an autonomous and controllable operating system, the successful development of HarmonyOS is a big step in the development of intelligent domestic operating systems in my country. However, it is undeniable that for the operating system, ecological construction is the core of the success of the operating system.
Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei’s Consumer Business Software Department, once said frankly: “It’s not technically difficult to make an operating system. The ecology is the core. The breadth, depth, and complexity of the ecology far exceed all individual technologies; Without the opportunities of industrial development and changes, it is difficult to succeed in building an ecosystem.”
Image source: Huawei official website
As the development roadmap of HarmonyOS has become clear, Huawei has been continuously improving its ecology in recent years. The 2020 annual report shows that Huawei’s global terminal connections have exceeded 1 billion, of which the number of mobile phone users has exceeded 730 million. About 90% of Huawei’s stock and mobile phones on sale can be upgraded to HarmonyOS. As of the end of 2020, the HMS ecosystem has become the world’s third largest mobile application ecosystem, with more than 2.3 million registered developers worldwide, including 300,000 overseas developers; more than 120,000 HMS Core applications have been integrated globally, and the number of overseas applications on the Huawei application market This is an increase of more than 10 times compared with 2019.
In mid-May of this year, at the HarmonyOS Connect Partner Summit, Huawei officially announced the upgrade of the hardware ecological brand of the full-scenario smart ecology, and the two major brands of HUAWEI HiLink and Powered by HarmonyOS were fully upgraded to HarmonyOS Connect. As they are further unified, it may be expected to further increase the number of HarmonyOS access devices.
Huawei revealed at today’s press conference: “At present, 300+ application and service partners, 1,000+ hardware partners, and 500,000+ developers have jointly participated in the construction of the Hongmeng ecosystem. We also hope that more manufacturers and developers from around the world will join. The OpenHarmony open source community helps it continue to evolve.”
In addition, in order to expand the ecosystem and cover more areas, Huawei has also increased cooperation with third parties. Among them, the auto industry Polar Fox αS has been equipped with HarmonyOS and Huawei ADS; Haier, Shuaikang, Supor, Fangtai, Joyoung and other home appliance brands, as well as Baidu Maps, Didi Taxi, 12306 and more than 300 companies have joined the Hongmeng Ecosystem; May 28, The official Weibo of Meizu Technology announced the access to HarmonyOS. The first products equipped with HarmonyOS are Lipro lights. According to the reporter’s understanding, 70% of the top 200 manufacturers in China’s application market for download and use have already decided to make HarmonyOS solutions. Guohai Securities pointed out that as HarmonyOS continues to improve, more companies will join the Harmony Ecosystem.
Previously, Huawei’s rotating chairman Xu Zhijun predicted that the number of terminals equipped with HarmonyOS is expected to exceed 300 million by the end of 2021, of which Huawei’s “1+8” equipment is expected to exceed 200 million by the end of the year, and various types of terminal equipment for third-party partners will exceed 100 million. station.
Essence Securities believes in a research report released recently that HarmonyOS 2 as a next-generation OS is expected to resonate with the AIOT era revolution. Its large-scale push indicates that the strategic set sail is imminent and will drive the ecological partners to sail.
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