Huawei launches HarmonyOS NEXT in 2024 without Android app

Following its reveal last year, Huawei this week announced plans to move to HarmonyOS NEXT, a new platform that completely removes support for Android apps.

Since the ban that changed Huawei’s entire business in 2020, the company has developed HarmonyOS as its own platform for phones, tablets and more. HarmonyOS started as a simple fork of Android, but has evolved since then, with its biggest change coming in the form of HarmonyOS NEXT.

This latest update was announced in 2023, and while it still visually resembles the Android-based platform Huawei has been using all this time, it was missing one key feature.

It does not support Android apps.

Until the end of 2023, the rush of developers to create versions of their apps for HarmonyOS NEXT has been widely reported, with developers having to port their work to a new app format to make them compatible with Huawei devices at the end of 2023. ‘future.

Now like GizmoChina reports, Huawei is going all out on HarmonyOS NEXT. The company apparently claims that the new platform “entirely” abandons the “AOSP codebase” in favor of a “completely independent architecture.” The result is a 30% performance improvement with a 20% drop in power consumption. It also includes “Harmony Intelligence”, Huawei’s version of AI features that includes image generation, “sound repair”, image-to-audio descriptions for visually impaired users and the ability for third-party applications to exploit AI for certain tasks, such as translation.

One of Huawei’s main goals is apparently the ability for apps on NEXT to span multiple screen sizes.

Apparently, HarmonyOS NEXT still isn’t quite ready for prime time. The update is still under development, but is now available to a limited number of beta testers in China. The official release is apparently planned for the fourth quarter of 2024.

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