Remember HarmonyOS, the operating system Huawei claimed it had written from the ground-up? Yeah it’s just Android 10.
After getting access to HarmonyOS through a grossly invasive sign-up process, firing up the SDK and emulator, and poring over the developer documents, I can’t come to any other conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way that Huawei describes the OS to the press and in developer documents doesn’t seem to have much to do with what the company is actually shipping. The developer documents appear almost purposefully written to confuse the reader; any bit of actual shipping code to which you hold up a magnifying glass looks like Android with no major changes.
The phrase “fake it till you make it” is often given as motivational advice, but I’ve never seen it applied to OS development before. If you’ve ever seen a modern Huawei Android phone, HarmonyOS is largely the same thing… with a few strings changed. So while there’s not much new to see, we can at least dissect HarmonyOS and debunk some of Huawei’s claims about its “brand-new” operating system.
So nothing new under the sun here.
Actually, I disagree just a little. The most interesting info that came out of the article for me is that HarmonyOS is actually two operating systems: a technologically rather dull port of Android 10 yes, but also a potentially interesting IoT operating system that was developed in-house.
I wish the article could have included a more nuanced discussion about the connections and differences between the two, but instead it got stuck on the forking of Android (mixed with plenty of embarrassing anti-China rhetoric) and couldn’t move on.
Ars Technica may not consider HarmonyOS to be viable as a result, but if Google has any sense it will be taking it more seriously. China is a huge market and a technology powerhouse, and using an existing operating system rather than starting from scratch was a smart move by Huawei.
Not surprising, it takes at least a decade to write a new operating system from scratch.
You can write something small and light, or big or bloated. You can use an existing codebase as a proxy while you refactor to a new desigg and drop and replace parts as you go. It would be stupid to write Huawei off behind a cloud of partisan nationalism. Stupid the Chinese are not. Oh, and the US just dropped out of Bloombergs top 10 innovators by country and did the UK ever make the top ten? That last one is shameful but this is what a generation of Reagan-Thatcher nonsense gets you.
Bear in mind Windows NT was a rip of VMS and Unix…
I think the whole of OS history was a rip or an anti-rip (ITS). Just think of where Android itself came from. Maybe Fuchsia is newer. Totally agree on the Chinese.
This is one of the most poorly written Ars article I have read in a long time. The author goes into great lengths of deriding the OS instead of doing an actual comparative analysis. An article like this won’t even pass the muster in lesser known technical journals. What a complete waste of time.
Misinterpretation of functional descriptions abound in the article. Take these for example:
“The aforementioned “Distributed Device Virtualization” will let users “connect their smartphones to smart TV, with the gravity sensor, acceleration sensor, and touch control capabilities of the smartphone virtualized as a remote control.” Many games and smart TV OSes have been doing this forever, and again, this just sounds like Wi-Fi.”
What does this have to do with Wi-Fi? If the author actually did some research, he would have known that this is a common feature available on LG remotes and Android TV remotes, which could be emulated using this OS. In these implementations, the sensor data is sent over Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi. So how does this “just sounds like Wi-Fi”? Could you do this with any Wi-Fi capable device, like a laptop? Also, what was he expecting? That this feature be more magical than intended? Uses an interface model that is not common to most users? Note that a feature like this is not available by default on Android, you will need a separate app for that or a specialized build for Android TVs. If the anyone claims that this is available by default on AOSP, please back it up with credible references. This is an uncommon feature on a smartphone OS as far as I’m aware.
“The “Distributed Virtual Bus” is “a communication base for interconnecting devices, such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, Smart TVs, and head units.” The “typical scenarios” for the Distributed Virtual Bus can “connect smartphones to food processors, range hoods, air purifiers, air conditioners, lights, curtains, and more.” So like, Bluetooth? Wi-Fi? How is this a top-line feature of your operating system?”
This again has nothing to do with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. This is about a standardized communication protocol between IoT devices to your smartphone, Possible applications for this would be to either control or get status information from these devices through your smartphone. Because the author has failed to provide the nitty gritty details on what has been implemented in the OS API to enable this feature seamlessly, we will never know the extent of what has been done in the OS. Another useless paragraph in a technical article with no attempt to reconcile this feature in the provided SDK. Even if the documentation fails to provide the details, some research and reverse-engineering could have been done in the SDK to identify its underlying functionality. Poor documentation abound in many frameworks and SDKs, even in solutions from big names like Microsoft and Oracle. However, if you claim to actually have a clue on what you are doing, unlike this author, analyzing the APIs would provide the significant details you need.
All that effort of submitting sensitive personal information to Huawei and getting access to their OS, was wasted effort by an incompetent technical writer. He would be better served writing marketing fluff articles in future.