by AKANI CHAUKE
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – HUAWEI is calling on developers to collaborate on the development of native apps for the company’s mobile operating system, HarmonyOS.
Rotating chairman, Eric Xu, made the call at the 21st Huawei Analyst Summit.
“We call on all app developers and owners in China to join our HarmonyOS-native app ecosystem as soon as possible, and work together to deliver a better experience to consumers,” Xu said.
HarmonyOS is the company’s next-generation operating system that can run on a wide range of smart devices, including smartphones, wearables, tablet computers and smart TVs.
By the end of 2023, HarmonyOS had been deployed on more than 800 million devices.
According to Counterpoint Research, Harmony OS reached 4 percent of the global market share and exceeded 16 percent market share in China in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Huawei has made substantial progress in developing the HarmonyOS ecosystem, with more than 4 000 of the targeted 5 000 apps already in the process of being ported to the new operating system.
The company aims to eventually have as many as 1 million apps configured for its ecosystem, Xu said.
In the past, Huawei’s focus was mostly on adapting HarmonyOS for all sorts of devices.
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,” said Xu.
In 2024, the key objective is to build up the HarmonyOS-native app ecosystem.
“This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers. Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps – and thousands of other apps – up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world, in addition to Apple iOS and Google Android.”
More than 380,000 developers have obtained HarmonyOS certification, and the number of industry-university partnership programs on HarmonyOS exceeds 150.
In 2023, more than 135 universities in China had classes teaching HarmonyOS, states the company’s Annual Report of year 2023 made public at the end of March.
Last year, Huawei’s HongMeng (Harmony) Kernel was awarded the industry’s first Evaluation Assurance Level 6 Augmented (EAL6+) certificate as part of Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (CC).
It is the highest security level available in the field of general-purpose operating system (OS) kernels, being the world’s first smart device manufacturer to receive the certification in this particular domain.
– CAJ News