Today, Huawei took to Weibo to confirm that it will be announcing the HarmonyOS 2.0 at 20:00 PM (local time) on June 2 in China. While the HarmonyOS is already available for IoT devices and TVs, the HarmonyOS (aka Hongmeng OS in China) debuting in the coming week will be aimed towards devices like smartphones and tablets as a rival for Android OS developed by Google.
At the beginning of 2019, Huawei claimed that it aims to become the largest smartphone manufacturer by the end of the year. However, in May 2019, the U.S. government added Huawei along with other Chinese companies to the Entity List, which prevented these firms from working with U.S.-based companies including Google. Hence, Huawei had to launch devices without Google Mobile Services (GMS), which severely impacted its business and plans to become the no. 1 smartphone brand.
In August 2019, Huawei announced the HarmonyOS 1.0 as an alternative to Android OS at the Huawei Developer Conference. Like Android, the Harmony OS is an open-source project based on Linux. Earlier this year, Ars Technica reported that the beta version of the HarmonyOS is similar to Android 10 OS. Hence, there is a possibility that the public version of HarmonyOS 2.0 may offer an experience similar to the current version of Android.
At the recently held Huawei China Ecological Conference 2021, Huawei’s rotating chairman said, “HarmonyOS is Huawei’s fully owned distributed operating system, which is mainly designed to reduce its dependency on Android and provide more capabilities and platform support than the existing mobile operating system.” He added that Huawei aims to install HarmonyOS on 200 million Huawei devices and 100 million devices from third-party manufactures this year.
As far as the June 2 launch event is concerned, Huawei is speculated to announce a couple of other devices such as Huawei MatePad Pro 2 and the Watch 3 series.
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