Chinese technology group Huawei announced this Friday that the latest version of its operating system, HarmonyOS Next, will no longer support applications developed for the Android system.
The company’s chief executive, Richard Yu, explained at the presentation that HarmonyOS Next dispenses with Linux or Unix kernels by developing its own kernels, file system, programming language, artificial intelligence framework and language models, Yicai newspaper reported.
Since its debut in 2019, HarmonyOS has been compatible with apps developed for Android.
Last September, Huawei expanded its native app offerings for HarmonyOS, attracting companies and developers from various fields such as social media, audio and video, gaming, news and finance to create their own ecosystem for HarmonyOS.
Yu, quoted by Yicai, said that about 800 million devices have HarmonyOS installed on devices such as cell phones, computers, TVs and cars, and that his company plans to release 5,000 of its own HarmonyOS apps by the end of this year.
Nearly half of China’s top 200 apps have begun developing their own HarmonyOS apps, including digital payments platform Alipay, video platform Bilibili and home delivery giant Meituan, the newspaper said.
According to a Shengang Securities research report published by Yicai, there were about 2.6 million apps available in the Chinese market at the end of last year, of which potentially one million will have to switch from Android to HarmonyOS, with a market value of $10 billion. yuan (about 1.3 billion euros).
Sanctions imposed by the United States on Huawei, announced in May 2019 and based on the company’s alleged ties to the Chinese military, resulted in North American Google being banned from selling the Chinese brand’s products.
These products included not only mobile applications from the Google Store, but also licenses for updates to the Android operating system on which the devices of the Chinese company were based, which then began developing its own HarmonyOS system.
Last month, Huawei’s rotating chairman Ken Hu said the company had managed to “weather the storm” after years of sanctions from Washington.
Hu predicted that Huawei will end 2023 with revenue of more than 700 billion yuan (91 billion euros), up 9% from 2022.