Huawei's HarmonyOS mobile OS turned out to be a fork of Android

Huawei’s HarmonyOS mobile OS turned out to be a fork of Android

The Harmony OS software platform, which is being developed by the Chinese company Huawei as an alternative to Android, is practically no different from the Google mobile operating system. This is the conclusion reached by Ars Technica editor Ron Amadeo after personally testing the beta version of Harmony OS 2.0.

Huawei HarmonyOS

After gaining experience with Harmony OS, the journalist came to the conclusion that the Huawei platform is a fork of Android, i.e. a fork of the Google operating system, based on the exact same codebase. “ After gaining access to Harmony OS through the extremely difficult process of registering, launching the SDK and the emulator, and studying the developer documentation, I cannot come to any other conclusion: Harmony OS is essentially a fork of Android. The way Huawei describes the OS in the press and developer documentation seems to have nothing to do with what the company actually delivers, ”writes Ron Amadeo, adding that any piece of OS code looks like part of Android without any noticeable changes. …

The message says that it is impossible to run OS emulation on the local computer. Instead, the emulator is streaming over a 720p network that is believed to be from China, which negatively impacts the speed. The user interface of Harmony OS and Android 10 with EMUI is virtually indistinguishable.

It seems that the only clear change is that the developers at Huawei have tried to remove all references to Android, replacing them with Harmony OS. Despite this, the mention of Android was still found. They were found while examining system services and components, where it was possible to identify such elements as “Android Services Library”, “Android Shared Library”, “com.Android.system EMI.overlay” and so on.

The journalist notes that Harmony OS does not look like a new platform in beta testing. This is evidenced by the presence of a large number of supported functions, settings, and other elements, the development of which from scratch in such a short time would be extremely difficult. All this indicates that at this stage, the beta version of Harmony OS 2.0 cannot be called a stand-alone platform that is developed independently of Android. According to the journalist, Huawei’s main contribution to the OS is the integration of a large number of its own applications and services, many of which have been available in China for a long time.