A Weibo account tipped that the Huawei’s in house OS has completed the testing for 2.0 Beta and is moving to Beta 3. The OS was tested on Huawei’s upcoming flagship phone, the Huawei P50. The P50 will be the first smartphone to ship with Harmony OS pre installed. Huawei’s older flagships can also opt into Beta testing for Harmony OS. The Huawei P50 will skip android completely. The Huawei phones currently ships with Android without GMS (Google Mobile Services). So this will be a big step of Huawei to the google free era.
A mass migration phase for existing Huawei phones to Harmony OS is expected on April. The flagships will be the first on the list. By the year end, Huawei executives expect Harmony OS to power 300-400 million devices worldwide. But this is also taking into account that Harmony OS is not only running on smartphones, but also on Smart TVs, Smart Watches and many other Internet of Things devices. Hopefully, Huawei will also allow other manufacturers to run Harmony OS on their smart devices that will expand its audience even more.
As a part of the migration expansion, the company has made it’s Petal search a full blown search engine. Before it was only an app search within Huawei devices. They have launched Petal Maps and Petal Docs. A Petal assistant, a Petal Keyboard, and Petal Vision (AR/VR utility) is also expected shortly. So it makes almost all right utilities for moving away from Google and android completely and relying on HMS (Huawei Mobile Services) entirely.
The Huawei ban started a few years back preventing them from trading with and using any US services or companies. They have lost access to android and chips entirely. But since android was an open source OS, they were able to incorporate it to their devices without Google Mobile Services. Now the company has built an entire OS by themselves. It seems that the US underestimated Huawei, they are such a huge company to be affected badly by such bans. We are waiting eagerly to use the Harmony OS powered devices to see how Huawei answered to the US.
