Huawei’s homegrown operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT (known as Hongmeng in China), is taking a major step towards its official launch. The company announced today that HarmonyOS NEXT will be available for public beta testing starting October 8th.
The news comes just three months after Huawei started rolling out the beta to developers in June, and now, they are opening it for the public. Public beta testing allows a wider user base to experience the OS and provide feedback before a full and stable rollout.
This is a significant step forward in Huawei’s goal to establish HarmonyOS as a major player in the mobile operating system market.
As you might be aware, Huawei’s new OS completely ditches Android’s underlying libraries, meaning you won’t be able to run any Android app on it. Huawei, however, claims they already have over 10,000 native apps on the platform across 18 verticals that serve 99.9% of users’ needs in China.
To build a more robust app ecosystem for users, the company has teamed up with major players like Ant Group, China UnionPay, and iFlytek. Plus, their developer base has also increased – the Huawei Developer Alliance now has 6.75 million registered developers which is a tenfold increase in just five years, says Huawei.
The company is also demonstrably committed to developer support. They are investing over 6 billion yuan specifically to fuel developer innovation within the ecosystem.
Huawei seems confident in its progress. Their President of Mobile Cloud, Zhu Yonggang, even claims HarmonyOS NEXT has accomplished in a year what took Android and iOS “17 years.” That’s a bold statement, but only time will tell.
The public beta will initially be available on select Huawei devices, including the Mate 60 series, Mate X5 series, and MatePad Pro 13.2 series. Can HarmonyOS NEXT dethrone Android and iOS dominance? We’ll have to wait and see.
Comments