The HarmonyOS system from Huawei is said to be brazenly copied by Android 10

February 4, 2021 Bary Howards

When the Chinese company Huawei decided to start developing its own HarmonyOS operating system (HongmengOS in China) due to US trade restrictions and a de facto cut from Google applications, not only mobile fans of this brand noticed. Is he serious? Will they go into the world with it? Will there be another big player in the field of mobile operating systems? It seemed that the answer to all the questions would be yes, and the representatives of the Chinese company themselves also fueled enthusiasm. Among other things, claims that the system will be original and built on its own foundations. As it turns out, HarmonyOS is actually just an exact copy of Android 10.

Last September, the head of Huawei stated that their system already reaches 70-80% of Android quality. It’s hard to say what he meant at the time, but according to current reports, it was quite possibly just a process of renaming individual items. So what came up? Ars Technica editor Ron Amadeo got to the HarmonyOS 2.0 emulator and set out to explore it. He found out that the source code and the whole environment are essentially identical to the tenth Android.

Expert: HarmonyOS is a copy of Android 10

“After hours of researching HarmonyOS, I can’t point to a single element that sets it apart from Android. Apart from renaming a few items, there is no difference between them. If anyone from Huawei wants to contradict this, I welcome it an example of something in the emulator that is functionally or at least aesthetically different from Android, ”Describes the analyst in his paper. He adds that this year Huawei plans to bring the system to life on phones, so it is difficult to defend the findings by saying that it is only a beta version. “There’s definitely no time for this obvious Android environment to become a Non-Android environment.”

There is nothing unique about using basic code from Android, or rather from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). But when other companies do, on the plane mark its system as its derivative. That’s why Huawei is under more pressure. From the beginning, he claims to be developing his own system. “Don’t call HarmonyOS a whole new system when the exact opposite is true,” says Ron Amadeo, the Chinese company. His findings are already being covered by journalists around the world and it certainly doesn’t shed a good light on Huawei. At the same time, a little humility and confession would be enough. Instead, HarmonyOS is disgracefully proving to be just a copy of the “pure” Android 10. We’re wondering if and how the company will respond.