From the first round of sanctions to the second round, Huawei’s many products and businesses have been under the shadow of the US sanctions, making it difficult to complete the production and delivery of new products.

In the face of this unprecedented external crisis, Huawei launched HarmonyOS, a self-developed system, along with HMS, a Huawei mobile service based on the system. But the hasty launch of products, there are inevitably a lot of places to be improved, Hongmeng system has been many netizens nicknamed “PPT system”. However, the road to self-rescue under this special background is far from over, with a lot of expectations of the new Hongmeng system 2.0 has been quietly on the shores of Songshan Lake.

HarmonyOS 2.0 is out, and the open source version is available for download

In 2019, Huawei innovatively launched harmonos 1.0, a full-scene distributed operating system, enabling rapid discovery, high-speed connectivity, hardware mutual assistance, and resource sharing for Huawei Smart terminals.

HarmonyOS 2.0 was unveiled at this year’s Huawei Developer Conference, bringing comprehensive updates to distributed capabilities such as distributed softbus, distributed data management, and distributed security, as well as an adaptive UX framework that allows developers to quickly reach tens of millions of new devices and users.

Among them, the open source Hongmeng project is called OpenHarmony. OpenHarmony is positioned as a full-scene open source distributed operating system.

According to the introduction, OpenHarmony creatively put forward the concept of adapting various terminal forms based on the same system capability on the basis of the traditional single device system capability, supporting the operation on various terminal devices. The first version supports the operation on 128K-128M devices. Developers will get the emulator, SDK package, and IDE tools, and the first release of HarmonyOS beta for smartphones will be for domestic developers in late 2020.Meanwhile, Yu said in his speech that Huawei donated the code to the China Open Atoms Open Source Foundation and announced the open source roadmap for HarmonyOS:

  • Starting September 10, HarmonyOS will open source for 128KB to 128MB devices such as large screens, watches and cars.
  • Open source for 128MB-4GB memory devices in April 2021,
  • It will be open source for all devices above 4GB after October 2021.

A year later, how has Hongmeng changed?

Before the conference, Yu Chengdong has repeatedly said on the media: “The Hongmeng OPERATING system has been invested hundreds of millions of dollars, the experience has been improving, has reached the 70-80% level of Android”

Released last year, Huawei Harmony OS 1.0 was defined as a distributed operating system for the future, including distributed capabilities, one-time development, multi-terminal deployment, and high security and reliability based on formal verification.

This year, Harmony OS 2.0 has a new definition, that is, fully enabling the full scene ecology, including cross-device, service flow, speed, visibility, privacy and security capabilities.According to yu’s timeline of Harmony OS 2.0’s Beta release for app developers, it will be launched on watches, cars and large screens on September 10, 2020, and will officially launch on mobile phones in December. Realize the leap development of different terminals.

One notable change from last year’s developer conference was that the concept of “microkernels” took a back seat and “distributed” capabilities were frequently mentioned.About the microkernel, many arguments are different, once caused a heated discussion in the industry. From the perspective of software resources, microkernel can reduce the accumulation and improve the internal operation speed. It can allocate resources more effectively than Android system, improve APP response speed and be more secure. But there were zero microkernels at this year’s developer conference, and instead there was a big talk about distributed softbus, distributed data management, and security.

On the application development side, according to people in the field, the UI framework for HarmoneyOS applications is not that different from traditional application development, and the syntax for bidirectional data binding is similar to Vue. More technical details about Hongmeng system are still waiting for technical leaders to slowly analyze.

Race against Time: How is HMS ecological Development?

To build an Ecosystem comparable to Android, there is one core middleware between apps, HMS. In the past two years, Hongmeng’s HMS ecosystem has been booming, and the support from developers around the world has given HMS a strong impetus. Now, HMS Core 5.0 will fully open up Huawei’s hardware and software capabilities.

With AI artificial intelligence, distributed, imaging, communication, AR map (Huawei River Map technology) graphics rendering and other technologies, the HMS Core 5.0 hardware and software capabilities are fully open, especially in the scene APIs has surpassed Google GMS Core, fourteen times more than last year.

From the change of data, you can intuitively feel the rapid growth of Huawei Hongmeng HMS ecology. As Ping An Chang, president of Cloud services, Huawei’s consumer business, says, a seed was planted last year and has sprouted this year.

According to Yu chengdong, the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) ecosystem has witnessed rapid growth with the support of 1.8 million developers worldwide: More than 96,000 apps integrate with HMS Core, and AppGallery has 490 million active users worldwide. From January to August 2020, AppGallery has distributed 261 billion apps, making it the third largest mobile application ecosystem in the world.

What new services will Huawei bring to developers?

HarmonyOS 2.0 one-stop development experience

  • Huawei DevEco Studio

HUAWEI DevEco Services cloud platform provides developers with one-stop Services, including development Services, testing Services, publishing Services, and analysis Services. In addition, it provides collaborative services for HUAWEI DevEco Studio, such as self-upgrade, Kit upgrade, and application test management.

  • HUAWEI DevEco Toolkit

HUAWEI DevEco Toolkit is a plug-in tool based on Android Studio functions. It helps developers quickly, conveniently, and efficiently use HUAWEI EMUI capabilities. It includes intelligent service (HUAWEI HiAI), Camera, security service, remote real machine debugging, and APP CloudTest.

HMS Core 5.0

Huawei previously announced HMS Core 3.0 in 2019, opening up more capabilities for developers, such as HMS Core’s Wallet Kit service, to create an All in One Wallet digital lifestyle for end users.

In a year, the opening capability of the latest HMS Core 5.0 has increased from 14 kits to 56 kits, and the number of apis has jumped from 885 to 12981, covering 7 major areas, rapidly forming differentiated innovation advantages.

Among them, CG Kit brings better graphics and image quality, thus improving the rendering efficiency of the game. Location Kit, by means of Super GNSS urban canyon positioning, VPS visual positioning and other technologies, meets the positioning accuracy requirements from meter level, sub-meter level to centimeter level in different scenarios.

Five root service engines In addition, huawei also globally developers at the core of hardware and software capabilities, including maps, search, pay five root, browse, advertising service engine, as well as the industry’s leading ability, AR map ability, communication ability to transfer, privacy protection, go all out, in every field developers jointly build a new generation of innovative applications user favorite.

Marketing resource support

In addition to technology opening, Huawei also provides developers with rich marketing resources in the commercial and operational fields, multi-channel brand exposure and user touch, preferential revenue sharing model for developers and advertising resource support to accelerate the development of new opportunities for developers around the world. At the same time, HMS Ecology is also helping overseas developers to enter China. Like domestic developers, when overseas developers enter the Chinese market, they also face challenges such as customer acquisition, product localization, and policy compliance. Huawei is committed to providing local services including consulting, shelving support and marketing services for global apps entering the Chinese market.

Huawei will continue to invest in ecological construction: three new ecological cooperation laboratories in Germany, Poland and Russia, and five new global developer service centers in Romania, Russia, Egypt, Mexico and Malaysia. Through localized service organizations and platforms, Huawei will better serve developers to enter the global market.

A single spark can start a prairie fire

Yu stressed the importance of developers repeatedly during the conference, “no one can extinguish the stars, every developer is a spark that Huawei wants to gather.”While Huawei has doubled the number of developers, it’s only the first step in a long journey compared to Google’s nearly 14 million Android developers.

Facing the coming third round of more severe sanctions, Huawei and other relevant domestic manufacturers have no more choices, but also hope that relevant domestic people, keep rational, can objectively and correctly view this incident.