Harmony OS 2.0 beta is based on Android. Huawei officials have long indicated that due to circumstances related to the U.S. veto. They will develop an ecosystem of their own, including a new operating system, called Harmony OS.
The idea was to create an alternative to Android that would be compatible with the apps of this system. But what we did not expect was that the system itself would be based on Android.
Harmony OS 2.0 beta is based on Android
This is what has been seen in the Harmony OS 2.0 emulator that Huawei has put in the hands of the developers. In the following image, we see an error message in Android 4.4 and the same message in Huawei’s system. The only difference in the message is, of course, the name of the operating system.
The point is that Huawei has not indicated that Android AOSP is being used as the basis for Harmony OS.
The same happens if we try to use an old Android app on Harmony OS, which indicates that the app has been built for an earlier version of Harmony OS. The reality is that Huawei seems to have changed the mentions to Android for mentions to his own system, and that’s it.
Even inside, the system we see remnants of the Android framework, which is illogical unless the system needs it.
This, per se, is not a problem and Huawei may have done this to ensure compatibility of existing applications with Harmony.
In the future, a turnaround using another technology could be seen once applications use the Huawei Mobile Services APIs, at which point it is possible to move away from Android. This would explain why Harmony OS is expected to have a different interface to Android in the future.
At the moment we have neither confirmation nor denial from the company about these images, so we will have to wait.
