Earlier this year we talked about Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT, which is most likely the only serious competitor to Android and iOS in the world. HarmonyOS started out as a mere Android skin, but over time Huawei invested heavily into the platform to expand it into a full-blown, custom operating system with a custom programming language, and it seems the company is finally ready to take the plunge and release HarmonyOS NEXT into the wild.
It’s indicated that HarmonyOS made up 17% of China’s smartphone market in Q1 of 2024. That’s a significant amount of potential devices breaking off from Android in a market dominated by either it or iOS.
HarmonyOS NEXT is set to begin rolling out to Huawei devices next week. The OS will first come to the Mate 60, Mate X5, and MatePad Pro on October 15.
↫ Andrew Romero at 9To5Google
Huawei has been hard at work making sure there’s no ‘application gap’ for people using HarmonyOS NEXT, claiming it has 10000 applications ready to go that cover “99.9%” of their users’ use case. That’s quite impressive, but of course, we’ll have to wait and see if the numbers line up with the reality on the ground for Chinese consumers. Here in the est HarmonyOS NEXT is unlikely to gain any serious traction, but that doesn’t mean I would mind taking a look at the platform if at all possible.
It’s honestly not surprising the most serious attempt at creating a third mobile ecosystem is coming from China, because here in the west the market is so grossly rusted shut we’re going to be stuck with Android and iOS until the day I die.