Huawei is one of the most successful brands in the mobile device space today – with products and services available in more than 170 countries and used by a third of the world’s population. However, the solutions company is facing a serious challenge as Google stopped allowing Huawei phones to access Android device. This means that Huawei can’t preinstall its future phones with Google apps and other Android OS services. Consequently, Huawei accelerated the development and deployment of its OS, Harmony, designed to deliver a unique user experience across different devices and scenarios. Huawei has been positioning it as much more than an alternative to Android but as Android’s next generation. The features, functions and benefits of Harmony OS are numerous and exciting to developers as well as end-users. Here is all you need to know .
In the history of OS development, Huawei’s Harmony is the first to adopt distributed architecture and distributed virtual channel technology. It also offers a shared communications platform and dispersed data management and can handle distributed task scheduling and virtual peripherals. Thus, all apps created on Harmony OS can run on various devices. By introducing a distributed design, HarmonyOS allows app developers to focus on service logic and makes the development of apps less complicated in all scenarios.
Unlike Android which uses the Linux kernel‘s scheduling mechanism, Harmony OS functions with a Deterministic Latency Engine. This provides accurate resource scheduling with real-time load analysis, forecasting and app characteristics matching. The result is remarkable improvements in response latency and latency fluctuations by 25.7% and 55.6% respectively. Besides, the microkernel OS can improve the performance and efficiency of Inter Process Communication (IPC) up to five times more than existing system according to Huawei.
In addition to reduced latency, the use of microkernel design provides enhanced security. Harmony’s microkernel uses formal verification methods to validate all running software path. This is mainly applied to security-critical fields like aerospace and chipsets–significantly contributing to the system’s reliability, and robustness. The formal verification methods are used to secure the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) kernel, thereby improving security. The microkernel also consists of the most basic services such as thread scheduling and inters processing, while a majority of system services are implemented in userspace. With less codes to audit, the probability of potential attacks is minimized.
Huawei’s Harmony OS empowers a distributed-design kit, cross-device IDE, multilingual unified compilation and is capable of adapting to various controls including screen interactions, drag-and-drop control, and visual programming. The implication of these features for mobile app developers is that they can now build apps that run on multiple devices, thereby creating a connected ecosystem for all users’ devices. According to Huawei, developers will be able to use Huawei’s ARK Compiler to compile code from multiple languages like C/C++, Java, and Kotlin for Harmony OS.
Huawei claims that its new OS, Harmony is 60% faster than Androids and one line of its OS code can do 100 lines of Android code, making it more powerful, efficient and flexible than any Linux-based operating systems. Harmony microkernel systems support low latency, improved multi-platform capacity, smooth interactive experience and a secured framework. However, the new technology has one big setback: the app ecosystem. In a bid to overcome this challenge, Huawei is developing its App Gallery platform and Mobile Service that will serve as alternatives to the Google Play Store and Google Play Services. App developers may want to be ready to transition or convert some of their apps to Harmony OS in the future.