According to Ars Technica, HarmonyOS is only a copy of Android

The HarmonyOS operating system is developed by Huawei in response to US sanctions. According to Ars Technica which has been the operating system under the magnifying glass, this one is a copy of Android.

You could not miss the conflict between Huawei and the US administration. Since May 2019, the Chinese manufacturer has been placed on an economic blacklist, cutting it off from its American partners. Since Huawei smartphones can no longer be used on the Android operating system. The decision was therefore to develop its own OS called HarmonyOS. This one, scrutinized by Ars Technica, would only be a simple copy of Android. With a rather tedious registration process.

Comparison of all Huawei phones available on MeilleurMobile

Will HarmonyOS be able to supplant Android?

When this OS was announced by Huawei, the promise made by Richard Yu was to present an operating system different from iOS as well as Android. For the moment, HarmonyOS is only deployed on Huawei’s connected objects and should make its arrival on phones by 2021. The Ars Technica site has searched the documents that are the lifeblood of the OS developed by the company Chinese. After studying its development kit and tedious registration, it seems that the dataset or “fork” would look identical to that of Android.

In fact, nothing illegal is done by Huawei since it is possible to exploit the fork of Android. As a reminder, Amazon had done the same for its Fire OS but without success for the firm of Jeff Bezos. In fact, the EMUI navigation interface looks like what exists on Android 10. The Chinese manufacturer has therefore worked on the open-source version of Google’s software. According to journalist Ron Amadeo, the procedure to install HarmonyOS is very procedural. You must provide a copy of your credit card, as well as a duplicate of your passport. The journalist, having provided false documents, saw his procedure be validated in two days. This is a common method in China, for example to create a League of Legends account, you need to provide a valid ID.

Huawei’s ambition with HarmonyOS is to supply 200 million smartphones. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese manufacturer will be able to compete in the face of years of experience at Google.

Source: Ars Technica