Consumer business CEO Richard Yu announced a plan to bring Huawei’s HarmonyOS 2.0 to more devices, including smartphones, at Huawei’s developer conference in Shenzhen, China today.
From The Verge:
Huawei will make a beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK available to developers today, though it’ll initially only support smartwatches, car head units, and TVs. A smartphone version of the SDK will follow in December 2020, and Yu hinted that phones running HarmonyOS might appear next year.
We had reported the possibility of Huawei using Sailfish OS for their devices in 2019 but moved towards Harmony OS in August 2019.
HarmonyOS only supports devices with 128MB of RAM or below at the moment, but that’ll expand to 4GB in April 2021, and no memory limit at all by October 2021.
The obvious question is how will HarmonyOS fare against Android and iOS but should they focus solely on that competition? Of course, Huawei can’t ignore the two biggest operating systems in the market but given its lower stature, they should make sure its current customers are happy with the new version and branch out from there.
They also need to contend with the sanctions against them doing business with American companies, which this will help to overcome.
I’m so used to seeing companies chase newness without caring for the existing customers and it’s a foolish way to lose an ethos of loyalty. So fingers crossed they can succeed and gain as much market share as they can without compromising their core base.