Comment by vgoh1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vgoh1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe for a second that buying a phone installed with HarmonyOS will ever be compelling to consumers. This is microkernel based, which makes me believe that it's not an AOSP fork, which means having compatibility with Android apps is not going to be straightforward. Think of the problems that Amazon has had filling their app stores with quality ports, and they are only selling tablets now because they are nearly giving them away for free, and also have tight integration with Amazon services, which some people like. PurityOS has a slight chance, but only if they can make it work within the niche audience that they are targeting. Microsoft couldn't make a phone OS work. Firefox couldn't make a phone OS work. It takes years to develop a catalog of apps. If Huawei were truly to be using this as a backup, they would need to start working on getting developers on their platform yesterday, not "in the future".

https://www.xda-developers.com/harmony-os-huawei-announce/

> Harmony OS is not compatible with Android apps out-of-the-box, confirms Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group. That means you won’t be able to merely side-load any Android app of your choosing. In a press conference, Mr. Yu says that app developers will have to make “small changes” to their apps in order to compile them to run on Harmony OS. He states that it is “very easy” to transfer Android apps to Harmony OS.

HarmonyOS, if it is a decent OS, which is a huge IF, will have the advantage of having a huge and fairly receptive Chinese market.

It better be open source at least if it wants to have any chance of being used outside China though, and not just “open” source.

> “open” source

Not sure what that means, but open source is pretty much irrelevant in this market, for one because we already have Android and it doesn't help much.

If you want to fork Android, it's easy and except for Google's proprietary services, like the notifications, you get compatibility with the entire Android ecosystem out of the box.

So why is there no successful fork around, except for Amazon's, which is very niche and doesn't count?

Open source is defined by the freedom to fork. However if the market forces are such that forking isn't feasible, then the open source nature is irrelevant.

Going back to your usage of quotes in "open" source, if that's what you meant, well, unfortunately Huawei is not the FSF.

I would say, their source code should be available for anyone to see, especially security researches. And what is installed on the phone should be exactly what is available in public.

> no successful fork around

There are hundreds, you just have to install them yourself.

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