Earlier this month, Huawei announced its much-anticipated HarmonyOS (aka HongMeng OS), which was expected to power the company’s upcoming smartphones. There were even reports suggesting HarmonyOS-powered smartphone getting launched in Q4 2019.
Now, Huawei’s Senior Vice President Vincent Yang said during a media event in New York that the company has no plans to launch a smartphone powered by HarmonyOS this year. He added that “we want to maintain one standard, one ecosystem.”
Vincent Yang confirmed that the Harmony would serve as an option B for the company. Only if the United States enforces the ban on Huawei, restricting the company from using Google’s Android platform, Huawei will switch to HarmonyOS.
The newly launched Harmony serves as a fail-safe if the US opts to enforce a ban that would prevent Huawei from accessing key parts of Android, including Google services like Maps and the Play store. Earlier this week, the US Commerce Department extended a temporary general license to let Huawei continue doing business with US companies.
Also, it seems that the platform isn’t powerful enough yet to be used as a mobile operating system. It was launched just a couple of weeks ago and the company has said that it has far fewer lines of code compared to Android to keep it simple. It’s likely to take some time for the company to make it a powerful mobile OS and to develop an app ecosystem for the platform.
