Huawei will release HarmonyOS sdk for smartphones in December

Huawei has announced that its own HarmonyOS operating system is coming to smartphones. The SDK for smartphones will appear in December and phones with their own operating system will probably arrive next year.

The HarmonyOS 2.0 sdk will be released on Thursday, writes The Verge. The keynote by director Richard Yu at the Huawei Developer Conference in the Chinese city of Shenzen is not yet publicly available online. The beta of the 2.0 version currently only supports smartwatches, car infotainment systems and TVs. After support for smartphones is in, Huawei will work on actual devices with the operating system.

In addition, other manufacturers can get started with HarmonyOS under the name OpenHarmony. From October next year, that could be phones with more than 4GB of memory. The system should then work the same as AOSP on Android. Supposedly, manufacturers can add their own services and apps to the system.

The step comes when Huawei can purchase components for smartphones from fewer and fewer companies. TSMC will stop making Kirin-socs for Huawei next week, while LG, among others, will no longer supply screens and Samsung will stop supplying various parts, including displays and memory. Other manufacturers working with OpenHarmony wouldn’t have those restrictions.

Huawei had already announced that smartphones with HarmonyOS would come. Huawei announced HarmonyOS last summer, a few months after it became clear that it could no longer use Google services due to the US government’s ban on trade. Despite that announcement, the software did not seem ready last fall.