Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.
“In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS,” Xu said.
According to Huawei’s rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is “communicating with developers” on the 1,000 or so apps that remain.
I haven’t looked into HarmonyOS before but is the plan to work off of a compatibility layer like Wine or Anbox?
I have no idea how detached it is from Android or how willing companies are to embrace it.
It started as a fork of Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but with latest HarmonyOS NEXT version they removed AOSP compatibility layer and moved to using their own SDK. I suspect the actual API is similar (it’s of course proprietary), so porting shouldn’t be very hard, but it’s still a chore, so it will be interesting to see if western companies decide it’s worth their time.
in a perfect world, there would be a common platform for apps and then any os could use that platform to run the apps. more mobile operating systems could exist as they aren’t forgotten because of bad app availability. devs would only have to maintain one version of the app. but i know nothing about programming, probably impossible.
I haven’t looked into HarmonyOS before but is the plan to work off of a compatibility layer like Wine or Anbox?
I have no idea how detached it is from Android or how willing companies are to embrace it.
It started as a fork of Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but with latest HarmonyOS NEXT version they removed AOSP compatibility layer and moved to using their own SDK. I suspect the actual API is similar (it’s of course proprietary), so porting shouldn’t be very hard, but it’s still a chore, so it will be interesting to see if western companies decide it’s worth their time.
Android developers (already having to deal with Huawei Mobile Services and AppGallery) right now:
Interesting. Thanks for filling me in
in a perfect world, there would be a common platform for apps and then any os could use that platform to run the apps. more mobile operating systems could exist as they aren’t forgotten because of bad app availability. devs would only have to maintain one version of the app. but i know nothing about programming, probably impossible.