HarmonyOS NEXT lays foundation for China to build operating system ecosystem: expert

HarmonyOS NEXT has laid the foundation for China to build an operating system ecosystem, said an expert on Tuesday following the launch of the first fully homegrown operating system developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei.

Huawei on Tuesday released the milestone operating system in Shenzhen City of south China's Guangdong Province, marking a watershed achievement in developing China's homegrown mobile operating system.

It has also become the third-largest mobile operating system, following Apple's iOS and Android.

The newly released native HarmonyOS has achieved full-stack independent development, covering everything from the operating system kernel, file system, programming language, compiler, and programming framework, to the AI framework and large models.

It has become China's first fully independently-developed mobile operating system. Previous versions of HarmonyOS had utilized parts of Android's open-source code.

"The function [of our operating system] has leaped forward thanks to our brand-new systemic framework. We've deeply integrated the ecosystem of software, hardware, and cloud, resulting in a more than 30 percent increase in smoothness. With our new distributed soft bus [system], we've achieved seamless cross-end collaboration, enabling a smoother delivery. This marks a further upgrade in our full-scenario experience, with connection speeds tripling, connection capacity increasing fourfold, and power consumption reduced by more than 20 percent," said Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei.

The biggest difference between the newly released HarmonyOS and Android or Apple's systems lies in its use of a distributed architecture, which enables cross-device collaboration. Developers can achieve one-time development and multi-device deployment. This stems from the fact that HarmonyOS was initially designed with the Internet of Everything in mind.

It is known that there are now over 15,000 native HarmonyOS applications and meta services available, covering 18 industries. General office applications can provide services to more than 38 million businesses nationwide.

"We've often said [in the past] that China's IT industry lacked both chips and 'soul'. After the chip issue was addressed, we still lacked our own 'soul' due to our dependence on foreign operating systems. With the launch of Huawei's HarmonyOS, we've largely addressed this issue. If we compare the Internet to a piece of land, we finally have our own land where we can plant our own 'crops'. In the past, we were planting our crops on someone else's land. The success of HarmonyOS has established a model for building an operating system ecosystem, which I believe is the most pivotal achievement," said Xu Zhen, researcher, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

HarmonyOS NEXT lays foundation for China to build operating system ecosystem: expert

HarmonyOS NEXT symbolizes ingenuity of China's homegrown operating system: expert

HarmonyOS NEXT symbolizes ingenuity of China's homegrown operating system: expert

Chinese mainland officials on Thursday pledged to ramp up efforts to deepen integrated development across the Taiwan Strait during a high-level meeting in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian.

The meeting reviewed the progresses achieved since September 2023, when the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council unveiled a circular saying that Fujian would be built into a demonstration zone to explore new pathways for integrated development with Taiwan.

Officials said the initiative has made a "strong start," and called for further policy support and implementation.

At the meeting, Song Tao, head of both the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Taiwan Office of the State Council, emphasized the need to solidly advance the plan to promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and advance the peaceful reunification of the motherland.

Fujian, which is the mainland province situated closest to Taiwan and shares cultural and linguistic ties with the island, has been a focal point for economic and social integration efforts.

Also at the meeting, provincial and relevant department officials vowed to continuously expand the field of social integration and consolidate the foundation of economic integration.

Xiao Weiming, deputy secretary-general of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planner, noted that Fujian utilized more than 50 percent of Taiwan's investment in the Chinese mainland in the first quarter of this year.

"In the first quarter of this year, the actual utilized Taiwan investment in Fujian Province reached 640 million U.S. dollars, achieving a rapid year-on-year growth and accounting for more than 50 percent of the national total. In the face of opportunities and challenges, we must face up to difficulties and firm up our confidence. We will continue to strengthen policy support for the construction of the demonstration zone, continue to strengthen industrial cooperation in fields such as electronic information, petrochemicals between Fujian and Taiwan, enhance the integration of related industrial chains and supply chains, and deepen the interconnection of infrastructure on both sides of the Strait," said Xiao.

Chinese mainland pushes for higher-quality integrated cross-Strait development