The original HarmonyOS ushered in the biggest upgrade in history, Yu Chengdong: The Mate70 series will be equipped with the official version of HarmonyOS

Titanium Media APP

2024-06-21 21:17Posted on the official account of Beijing Titanium Media APP

At the 2024 Huawei Developer Conference (HDC), HarmonyOS ushered in the biggest upgrade ever.

"The HarmonyOS operating system was officially released on August 9, 2019, lasted 1,778 days, and after four generations, the number of HarmonyOS ecological devices has exceeded 900 million, and 2.54 million HarmonyOS developers have invested in the development of HarmonyOS World, with 4.35 million HarmonyOS Academy learners and 82.7 billion developer service calls per month."

Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Device BG, and Chairman of the Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, said that HarmonyOS native applications have entered a full-scale sprint stage, and more than 5,000 commonly used applications have been developed, of which more than 1,500 have been put on the shelves.

According to Yu Chengdong, the beta version of HarmonyOS NEXT will be available to developers and pioneer users on June 21. HarmonyOS NEXT Beta is available on the Mate60 series, Mate 40 series, X5 series, and Matepad Pro 13.2-inch. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the official version of HarmonyOS NEXT will be released on more models, including the Mate 70 series.

Greater freedom and stricter security audits

Complete the construction of an operating system from 0 to 1, so that HarmonyOS can make more personalized functions based on the native system.

In this upgrade, HarmonyOS NEXT continues the multi-device collaboration feature, maintaining a unified ecosystem for one system, and developers only need to develop and maintain one version of HarmonyOS native applications to bring a consistent experience across different devices.

At the same time, HarmonyOS's distributed soft bus has also been upgraded, and the connection speed between different terminal devices has been increased by 3 times with lower power consumption, and up to 4 devices can be connected at the same time. For example, in the audio-visual scenario, the music and videos that are being played on the mobile phone can be "panned" to the tablet or laptop at a faster speed to continue watching. This means that in the HarmonyOS ecosystem, users can unify all terminal devices with one account.

In addition, similar to Apple's solution, Huawei is also trying to implant the capabilities of AI large models into the bottom layer of the HarmonyOS system, so as to call the functions of multiple apps at the same time, so that terminal devices can complete more complex human-computer interactions. The difference is that the AI model used by HarmonyOS is self-developed by Huawei, while Apple chooses to cooperate with a third-party company such as OpenAI.

For example, using Huawei's self-developed Pangu model, Huawei's previous voice assistant "Xiaoyi" can be incarnated as an AI agent to help users automatically retrieve calendar information, input methods, contacts, and files, and generate text and send SMS or email. In third-party apps, Xiaoyi can identify location information, pictures, automatic navigation or shopping. Of course, the premise is that these apps agree to the AI calling this information.

It is worth noting that in order to make the system pure and secure enough, HarmonyOS has made more restrictions on application permissions after this upgrade.

First of all, before the software application is released, Huawei's App Store prohibits the listing and installation of applications and code that have not been tested for security. Second, HarmonyOS NEXT removes nine types of unreasonable permissions, such as call logs, text messages, phone calls, and reading the list of installed apps.

Finally, the way users manage permissions changes from "managing permissions" to "managing data". For example, because of the mechanism of secure access to the camera, the application can only obtain the result of this code scan in the operation of scanning the code to take pictures, and the user does not need to give permission to use the camera to take pictures.

Market share increases, Hongmeng crosses the "line of life and death"

In addition to the functional update, Yu Chengdong's disclosure of another data this time has aroused the attention of the market.

Yu Chengdong said, "No one can extinguish the starry sky", and the number of Hongmeng ecological devices has exceeded 900 million. Within Huawei, a market share of 16% is considered the life-and-death line of the HarmonyOS system. The market share is more than 16%, which means that the HarmonyOS can rely on the power of the ecosystem and gradually grow.

According to a Counterpoint Research report, in the first quarter of this year, HarmonyOS had a market share of 17% in China, while Apple's iOS was 16%. This means that HarmonyOS has surpassed iOS in the Chinese market for the first time and has become the second largest smartphone operating system in the Chinese market.

HarmonyOS's share of the Chinese market can increase and surpass Apple's, largely relying on the significant growth of terminal device shipments.

According to a report released by market analyst Canalys, in the first quarter of 2024, the smartphone market in Chinese mainland will recover for the first time in two years, with shipments unchanged from the same period last year, reaching 67.7 million units. Among them, Huawei has experienced 13 quarters to regain the first place in the Chinese mainland market, with 11.7 million units shipped and a market share of 17% thanks to the enthusiastic market response of the Mate and nova series.

Due to the return of Huawei and the fact that Apple's models were updated less than expected, the latter's shipments declined in the first quarter of this year. According to IDC data, Apple's smartphone iPhone shipments in the first quarter of this year were 50.1 million units, down 9.6% from 55.4 million units in the same period last year; Among the top five smartphone brands, Apple saw the largest year-over-year decline in the first quarter. Among them, Apple's shipments in the Chinese market fell 19% year-on-year in the first quarter, the worst performance since 2020.

Next, as more Huawei models are introduced to the market, Hongmeng's market share is expected to continue to rise. One of the biggest challenges facing Huawei is whether more third-party application vendors are willing to join in.

According to previous media reports, Tencent released the latest MMKV component version 1.3.5 in April, announcing the official support for HarmonyOS NEXT for the first time. MMKV is a key-value general open-source component based on mmap memory mapping, and the underlying serialization/deserialization is implemented by protobuf, which has the advantages of high performance and strong stability. From 2015 to the present, the MMKV component has been used on WeChat.

"Huawei looks forward to partners from a wide range of industries and more massive applications joining the HarmonyOS ecosystem as soon as possible." Yu Chengdong said that HarmonyOS NEXT is expected to launch the beta version for consumers in August, and with the launch of the Mate 70 series in the fourth quarter of 2024, the native HarmonyOS will truly move towards large-scale commercial use. (This article was first published in the Titanium Media APP, by |.) Rao Xiangyu Ed. | Zhong Yi)

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