A little over a month ago the news had already circulated that the first betas of HarmonyOS were based on Android, news partially denied by Huawei sometime later, with the company reiterating that its operating system would not be a copy of Android (or iOS, for what it’s worth); even if this tells us nothing about what its “foundations” are. And in fact, according to what Ars Technica discovered, HarmonyOS would be nothing more than a modified version of Android 10.
Leaving aside the difficulties to be overcome to have access to the SDK (Huawei wants a name, address, email, telephone number, identity document and photo of a credit card in the same person’s name: all hand-reviewed by a Huawei employee within 2 working days, even before you can download anything), the first thing to note is that the developers don’t even really have access to the SDK, but only a streaming version of it. Instead of running it locally, the emulator is on Huawei’s servers, and the developer accesses it via the cloud (after verifying his identity). Ars hypothesizes (with good reason) that it is a physical smartphone, with HarmonyOS installed, connected to the network.
But let’s forget the preambles, and let’s see what is concrete in this HarmonyOS.
When the emulator is started, what appears before us is the classic EMUI that we already know. This is not surprising, because Huawei had already confirmed that it wanted to continue using its interface, which simply should have been ported from Android to HarmonyOS. Apparently, however, the one below the EMUI is just plain Android.
References to basic OS apps abound: “Android Services Library,” “Android Shared Library,” “com.Android.systemui.overlay,” “Androidhwext,” and so on, as you can see in some screenshots above. Even the “HarmonyOS System” package itself uses the Android system icon, and in many cases there seems to have been a simple “find and replace” of “Android” with “HarmonyOS”.
If that’s not enough to convince you, simply download any app that provides information about the system, and it will report that the phone is based on Android 10 Q (more screenshots above).
Another important element is that the system is already complete. There are no typical gleanings of a beta system, with maybe applications that do nothing, limited functionality and folders left lying around without sense. Here is everything. From gestures to payments via NFC, passing through the dark theme, the management of permissions and notifications, etc. It’s a finished system, nothing like something really new.
Let’s clarify, for the avoidance of doubt, that Android does not mean Google. There are no Google services on HarmonyOS, services that nobody uses in China. Each local manufacturer has its own app store, and Huawei has been used to providing phones without Google services to Chinese customers for years. At the same time, however, the HarmonyOS store (or App Gallery ) is extraordinarily complete and practically indistinguishable from what we already have on Android. There are apps from Microsoft, Amazon, TikTok, WeChat, Tencent, Baidu, Weibo, Evernote (to name those mentioned by Ars), and there are also reviews that are years old when HarmonyOS didn’t even exist.
In short, according to the Ars report, HarmonyOS is similar to an Amazon FireOS: a fork of Android, pure and simple. With the difference that at least Amazon has been transparent about it and hasn’t called it a new operating system. After hours spent digging into the SDK, Ars did not find a single significant difference from Android, both on a functional and aesthetic level. It could be argued that at the moment it is only a beta, but if HarmonyOS is really in the pipeline within the year, it will take some time to move from the current state to that of “non-fork”.
Ars then continues to bring other examples of how the HarmonyOS documentation itself ( you can find it here ) is extraordinarily complete, for a new operating system, but also extraordinarily smoky and vague, with words and phrases that practically mean nothing. If you wish, find the complete article here for further information.