Recently, at the Huawei Developer Conference, Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei and chairman of the terminal BG, announced the launch of a new operating system - HarmonyOS NEXT, also known as "pure-blooded Hongmeng". The system uses Huawei's self-developed HarmonyOS kernel, which realizes full-stack self-development from the inside out, and is no longer compatible with Android applications.
From the research project in 2015, commercialization in 2019, and the release of "Pure-blooded Hongmeng" in 2024, Hongmeng has been grinding a sword for ten years, and Hongmeng has finally stood with Android and iOS. The key to success in the future is ecology, which is not a one-man show for Huawei, but a collective "chorus" of China's information industry.
Steadily, Hongmeng stands firmly on the third pole of the operating system
In 2007, Apple released the original iPhone with iOS, which was refreshing from design to operation, and this phone also laid the direction for the development of smartphones. In the same year, Google and 84 manufacturers, developers and telecom operators formed the Open Handheld Consortium to develop Android, which was then open sourced to become the world's largest mobile operating system. After the end of the Symbian system in 2013, Android and iOS began to rule for more than a decade. During this period, there were many companies that launched an attack on it, but they all returned with a feather.
In the domestic market, mainland Internet giants Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have launched Alibaba Cloud OS, tita, and Baidu Cloud ROM respectively, all of which are short-lived and retreat without a fight; Firefox OS has a lot of noise in the industry, but the company's resources are insufficient, resulting in insufficient product performance, which is abandoned by many apps and ends up in nothing. In foreign markets, whether it is Microsoft's Windows Phone system cooperated with Nokia, or Samsung's Tizen system cooperated with Intel, all of them ended in failure. The group rose together, but none of them won a place, and Android and iOS have almost become two insurmountable peaks.
At the beginning of the birth of Hongmeng, it was also not optimistic, and the industry believed that it was difficult for Huawei to create an independent operating system in a short period of time, and even called Hongmeng "Android skinning", questioning that Huawei was just doing a crazy concept marketing. At the same time, in 2019, Huawei has been unable to obtain or manufacture the most advanced chips, and mobile phone sales have plummeted, leaving developers deterred. Therefore, Hongmeng's future was bleak at that time.
However, Huawei Hongmeng has characteristics that the "sages" do not have, which provides the prerequisites for it to stand out from the encirclement. One is the determination to break the boat, unlike Samsung's difficulty in giving up the dividends brought by Android, under the frequent suppression of the United States, Huawei has worked hard to overcome difficulties, and the pace of developing the operating system has not stopped for a moment. The second is that there are sufficient technical resources, before the sanctions, Huawei and Apple were equally divided in the domestic high-end mobile phone market, and had deep technical accumulation in smartphone software and hardware. Third, Huawei's technology is forward-looking, and HarmonyOS is positioned as a new operating system for the all-scenario intelligent era and the Internet of Everything era.
In the past five years, HarmonyOS has continued to blossom and bear fruit in terms of technology, products and ecology step by step. In 2019, Huawei released HarmonyOS 1.0, announcing that HarmonyOS would be open sourced. In 2020, Huawei released HarmonyOS 2.0, which makes three major improvements: distributed soft bus, distributed data management, and distributed security.
In 2021, smartphones and other products equipped with HarmonyOS 2 were upgraded on a large scale, exceeding 100 million yuan in 100 days, with an upgrade rate of 77%, making it the fastest-growing terminal operating system in history. In 2022, HarmonyOS 3.0 will bring six major upgrades: Super Terminal, Universal Card, Smooth Performance, HarmonyOS Smart Connect, Privacy Security, and Information Accessibility, with more than 320 million devices equipped with HarmonyOS and thousands of applications. In 2023, HarmonyOS 4 will be officially released, bringing five major upgrades of personalization, efficiency, intelligence, ultra-fast play, and super peace of mind, achieving full coverage of 18 vertical fields such as travel, social networking, finance, office, life, and entertainment, and the development of the native HarmonyOS version of 5,000+ applications.
It took 1778 days, after 4 generations, the number of HarmonyOS ecological devices has exceeded 900 million, and the equipped devices have expanded from the smart screen at that time to today's mobile phones, tablets, TVs, smart cars and other full-scene devices, and at the same time, 2.54 million HarmonyOS developers have invested in the development of the HarmonyOS world, 4.35 million people have learned in the HarmonyOS Academy, and the number of developer service calls has been 82.7 billion times per month. In the first quarter of this year, HarmonyOS surpassed iOS for the first time with a market share of 17%, becoming the second largest mobile operating system in the Chinese market. At the same time, HarmonyOS NEXT has achieved full-stack self-development, breaking away from the Android ecosystem and truly reshaping the operating system industry.
In 10 years, Hongmeng has completed the journey of 30 years of its peers, and has made a name for itself, and the future is promising.
HarmonyOS NEXT：鸿蒙腾飞的开
From quantitative change to qualitative change, the latest version of HarmonyOS NEXT has achieved a transformation. HarmonyOS NEXT bids farewell to traditional code such as Linux kernel and AOSP, adopts the HarmonyOS kernel, and only supports HarmonyOS native applications, which is truly independent of Android and iOS, an independent and controllable operating system originating from China, from the operating system kernel, file system to programming language, compiler/runtime, programming framework, to design system, integrated development environment, AI framework and large model, etc., to achieve full-stack self-development and comprehensive breakthroughs.
It is understood that HarmonyOS NEXT adopts a new system architecture of vertical integration of devices and clouds, and has carried out a series of differentiated upgrades in all scenarios, intelligence, interaction, and security, and the overall performance of HarmonyOS NEXT is 30% higher than that of HarmonyOS 4.
In terms of all scenarios, HarmonyOS NEXT continues the inherent cross-device genes, and mobile phones, tablets, and smart screens can share a single system. One system creates a unified ecosystem, and developers only need to develop and maintain one version of the HarmonyOS native app to bring consumers a convenient and consistent experience on different devices.
In terms of interaction, the distributed soft bus has also been fully upgraded, with a 3-fold increase in connection speed at lower power consumption, and up to 4 devices can be connected at the same time. The connection and interaction between multiple devices has also been optimized, and the interaction becomes simpler and more natural when you are close to it.
In terms of intelligence, Huawei has combined its AI capabilities accumulated over the years with the HarmonyOS native application ecosystem to bring a new HarmonyOS native intelligence. Xiaoyi has also been upgraded to Xiaoyi agent, which has better scene perception, intent recognition and user understanding capabilities to help users better obtain the personalized services they need. At the same time, HarmonyOS NEXT comprehensively builds AI capabilities that are open to applications such as image intelligence, call intelligence, document intelligence, and cross-application collaboration, and works with developers to create ecosystem-level HarmonyOS native intelligence.
In terms of security, HarmonyOS NEXT reconstructs the security system and order of the operating system, bringing a natively secure system and ecosystem. The excellent security capabilities of the HarmonyOS kernel have been highly recognized by the industry and have become the first international CC EAL 6+ certified general-purpose operating system kernel.
The emergence of "pure-blooded Hongmeng" has broken the bipolar pattern of mobile operating systems Android and iOS, and will provide more choices for developers across the country and the world, bringing new technologies, new models and new formats to the development of the Internet of Everything industry, and providing foundation support for the mainland to build an independent and controllable modern industrial system.
If the ecology is successful, Hongmeng will be successful, and it is not Huawei's work
Undoubtedly, the current Hongmeng has shown strong competitiveness in terms of technology and products, but the most difficult thing in developing the operating system is not technology, but ecology. Hongmeng has completed the base and experienced the two major battles, and the remaining battle is ecology. Xu Zhijun, Huawei's Rotating Chairman, said at the Huawei Analyst Conference in April: "Building a HarmonyOS native application ecosystem is the most critical thing for Huawei in 2024. "In the past six months, Huawei has spared no effort to promote application vendors to develop HarmonyOS native applications, and with the promotion of partners, it has taken a big step towards "ecosystem success".
In fact, since Huawei announced the full launch of the HarmonyOS native application in September 2023, many provinces and cities have launched the development of government affairs and livelihood applications and provincial-level media HarmonyOS native applications, and many cities have released HarmonyOS talent training policies to help build the HarmonyOS ecosystem. At present, more than 5,000 commonly used applications in mainland China, which account for 99.9% of users' usage time, have all started the development of HarmonyOS native applications, of which more than 1,500 have been put on the shelves, covering convenient life, travel, cultural tourism, financial management, social information, government affairs and people's livelihood, productivity tools, audio-visual entertainment, games, news media, corporate office and many other fields.
For example, in the field of convenient life, Meituan has redesigned the cycling experience, unlocking the bike by scanning the code in one step, returning the bike directly in the lock screen state, and the familiar functions can also be renewed. In the office field, DingTalk is deeply integrated with HarmonyOS NEXT, allowing users to join meetings with one click from the system calendar. In the field of government affairs and people's livelihood, the Zheliban App is one of the first government applications in China to launch the development of HarmonyOS native apps......
At present, the HarmonyOS native application landscape has basically taken shape and entered a full-scale sprint stage. In order to help more partners and developers quickly access the HarmonyOS ecosystem, partners such as Ant Group, China UnionPay, and iFLYTEK have opened up their vertical innovation capabilities and worked with Huawei's base capabilities to provide developers with efficient full-link development tools, reducing development workload by up to 90%, helping the industry accelerate the development of HarmonyOS applications. At the same time, more than 60 SDKs have been released on the HarmonyOS ecosystem partner SDK market. At the same time, Huawei provides more than 3,000 meta-service APIs, nearly 50 scenario-based controls, and a device-cloud convergence development kit to improve development efficiency by more than 40%, truly realizing one-time development and multi-device deployment. In addition, Counterpoint Research reported that during this year's 618 shopping festival, Huawei's smartphone sales increased by 42.4% year-on-year, and flagship products such as Mate 60 and Pura 70 continued to sell well, providing ecological partners with "peace of mind".
Hongmeng has become the rolling torrent of the times, and the real rise, and Android, iOS three parts of the world, but also need the full support of China's information industry, this breakthrough battle, need more industrial chain enterprises to contribute, through innovation and collaboration, to build a strong Hongmeng ecology.