Huawei replaces Android with HarmonyOS, which is also Android | Hacker News Reader

Huawei replaces Android with HarmonyOS, which is also Android

arstechnica.com

135 pointstvvocold207 comments

> Another major nit I have to pick with HarmonyOS is its lack of access and transparency. Just accessing the SDK and emulator required me to go through an insane process that involved uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers so that I could be approved to access the SDK after a two-day waiting period. Most companies just have a download link. You don’t get to run the emulator locally on your computer, where it could be inspected more thoroughly—instead, it runs remotely on a server in China somewhere, and video of it is streamed to your computer. After we wrote our article, Huawei took down the emulator and blocked “overseas” users from downloading the SDK.

Essentially useless for me then.

> Just accessing the SDK and emulator required me to go through an insane process that involved uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers so that I could be approved to access the SDK after a two-day waiting period.

My sample size is tiny, ymmv etc. but a few big-Chinese-company-designed products I've bought (DJI drone, wireless security camera) have been like that. Not "thanks for buying the product, please enjoy, there's an app if you want and we value your privacy." Instead it's "you WILL install the app and you WILL give it access to contacts, camera, microphone and everything else, then you WILL create an account on our web site where all of your personal information WILL be stored, and only THEN may you use the thing."

I don't know if it's just my bad luck with these products or if the Chinese market is much more accepting of this kind of invasive authoritarian treatment.

I don't know about "accepting," but China has some very strict "real identity" rules and laws when it comes to accessing just about anything connected to the internet. It is authoritarian.

The US market is much more accepting of this data collection by the Chinese.

I tried doing iOS dev years ago. Apple had me fax them my driver's license. You can whine about the FSF all you want but I've never had to do that to use gcc.

This comment is very insightful and the comparison is sound.

This is just one anecdotal experience out of hundreds of thousands. Because of your one bad experience you just dismiss Apple? I can also provide 1 anecdotal piece of evidence: I've done iOS dev and published apps in the App Store. Never had to fax my drivers license to Apple.

I'm not alone. Also requiring state-ID in order to share software should be disturbing enough to abandon platforms.

This has meme potential! Talking about some major corp and hoops one has to jump through to do X, react with "say about the FSF what you will, but..." ; Made my day. What are you even talking about? How is this a meaningful comparison?

It is meaningful, inasmuch as it shows the stark difference between developing for an extremely free ecosystem (in this case, free software using GNU tools) and an extremely closed one, like Apple's, where (apparently, as I didn't know about this, but it is realistic) you have to mail them your driving license. Free software protects you forever exactly from something like this and the FSF has been speaking about this possibility for decades.

NVM theres a big sign on process.

https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu...

It seems there are two emulation environments, one that is remote you need to sign in and verify yourself. The other is your local simulator no need to sign in or verify.

The local simulator is only for wearables and cameras, if you want HarmonyOS 2.0 devices you need to use the remote simulator.

Edit: Locally you can only run project templates that have [Lite] in their name, maybe in the future they will make other simulators available. Signing up for remote emulation is too much of a effort for me.

Edit: Parent comment used to say "you can just download the SDK" or something like that.

Original response below:

--------------------------------------------------------------

From that page:

NOTE

If you need to use the DevEco Studio emulator, your HUAWEI ID must pass the identity verification by Huawei. It is recommended that you submit your HUAWEI ID for identity verification review immediately after the registration. For details, refer to Identity Verification.

The identity verification requirements for individual (not enterprise) developers are here: https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/start/ibca-0000...

HUAWEI Developers supports multiple identity document combinations for verification, including:

1. ID card + bank document

2. Passport + bank document

3. Other supporting documents (such as driver's license) + bank document

> uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers

What?! The Chinese government has found the cheapest way of building records on foreign citizens: just ask them to give you their credentials and anything that can be used to impersonate you. They'll do it.

How are people even doing that on purpose? Man, fuck that.

Ever traveled outside of your own countries a lot of airports have facial recognition entry/exiting ports that will scan your face and your passport.

this is a textbook false equivalence. Travelling hinges on the ability to verify your identity. Using a piece of software does not and must not require sensitive documents like a passport.

  Travelling hinges on the ability to verify your identity

What a strange world we live in since the 80's

What about travelling has identity verification built in? It’s just an arbitrary rule in both examples.

> it compiled Android apps with a different file extension

It seems that you don't even need the SDK — just build an apk with the regular Android SDK and rename it.

Happens plenty of times with US companies wanting my ID before I can access developer portals

Look when you have a hostile foreign power destroy your entire business and and force you to retool most of your software stack, you get kinda restrictive with people inspecting your new stack coming from that country.

Fascinating to see how much is 'inspired' by Apple's design and Microsoft's for the document app. I'd feel dirty in so blatantly copying someone else's design, but Huawei doesn't share those concerns. Maybe for good reason.

The problem is that, in general, when a company doesn't respect intellectual property laws or obviously makes use of industrial espionage (and I'm not suggesting either is true for Huawei) they are sending a clear signal that laws do not apply to them.

So as a customer why would I trust any company with my most personal health, banking or own intellectual property if that company sees no reasonable limitations to its behaviour in any other sphere?

The original purpose for branding was to allow customers to identify food products they could trust. The same is true for technology.

IP laws is a fiction. If the US authorities want to enforce rules like "you can't paint your car green because the green color has been patented" they can, but I see no reason why other countries would adopt this nonsense. Besides, countries aren't governed by laws, they only have treaties and agreement between each other that they can enter and leave voluntarily.

I think practically speaking such concerns are way overblown. There are tons of megacorps with lots of very ethically questionable practices (not just tech wrt privacy issues, think about money laundering banks, food and energy companies causing environmental damage). The majority of consumers don't seem overly concerned unless they are very directly victimised by said practices.

Its telling that a comoany can get away with it in another country but not the US. It means that you atleast have some legal recourse with a US company.

I hadn’t even thought of this consciously: that having such disregard for authenticity also could mean they are playing it fast and loose with other, more important topics such as privacy.

Thanks for this insight

Just a gander at Huawei’s history is enough to conclude that intellectual property is not a concept they agree with.

You might be the sort of person who takes a principled stand against intellectual property, so not see Huawei's behaviour as inconsistent with protecting consumer privacy?

I don't personally trust Huawei to behave responsibly. But I don't really trust any other company either. Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.

Western IP law is arguably just a tool to delay Chinese progress (speaking from an international perspective). A Chinese company ignoring it doesn't really tell us much about how the company will behave towards its customers.

> Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.

Nope. Android is a mobile OS and is pretty well done versus the many other oses it replaced.

> Western IP law is arguably just a tool to delay Chinese progress (speaking from an international perspective)

I'm pretty sure IP law wasn't created to "slow down Chinese progress". It is there to provide an incentive for invention and creativity. The whole point is to grant a limited time where an inventor can profit with minimal competition so it slows everyone's progress. But to say IP law targets China is at best mistaken.

IMO developing countries are hurt by IP mostly. China has shown a way to use market to trade for IPs, which I think countries like India can do, but small developing countries will not be able to follow this example.

In order for developing countries to develop, they have to jump out this loop. With the exponential development of technology, the absolute gap between developing world and developed world will be so huge that they will never have a chance of reaching the same level.

IP law favours incumbents. Ignoring IP law has been the fastest way to secure Chinese prosperity, and that is what they did. It makes sense and it doesn't tell us how a Chinese company will treat their customers.

Note that despite the argument that IP law promotes invention and creativity Huawei is a world leading tech innovator in 4G. Despite obviously having little respect for IP law. They'll probably discover the importance of IP law now that they have taken the lead but it IP law appears to have been more of a hindrance in getting the innovation started.

> IP law favours incumbents.

Yes, that is the whole point. IP gives an inventor a reward in the form of limited or no competition for a period of time.

> it doesn't tell us how a Chinese company will treat their customers.

This is like saying your wearing the wrong running shoes to swim five miles.

Huawei, and I suspect most of China, don't agree that they should be playing by rules that favour foreign incumbents.

It is easy to see how a company could believe that and also believe in treating their customers well. It would be a very competitive company.

> This is like saying your wearing the wrong running shoes to swim five miles.

I don't follow your point but I agree would be foolish to wear running shoes while swimming.

Western IP law is a tool to protect the livelihoods of R&D departments, which would immediately shutter if competitors were legally allowed to bypass 10 year dev cycles.

> Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.

That's uncharitable. Android effectively started as a pro-web play: a way to ensure Google could deliver their services to mobile users regardless of what mobile manufacturers wanted (we're talking Nokia and Blackberry, which dominated the sector at the time and, together with phone carriers, could dictate what would or would not get to phones). They later got greedy with data-siphoning, but Apple effectively does the same, they're just a bit shy about over-exploiting it.

I think it is unfair to say Apple does the same. It is night and day between the two platforms when it comes to privacy and I say it as someone who really dislikes Apple’s walled garden.

Yeah of course the same way Western world feels "dirty" because they copied Yoga or patented indigenous herbals or any number of other things?

Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people? That's how humans have progressed these thousands of years. Not by paranoid, corporate silos and NIH syndrome and draconian patents.

> Yeah of course the same way Western world feels "dirty" because they copied Yoga or patented indigenous herbals or any number of other things?

I don't think the comparison holds at all: Yoga is something people do in many different ways, not a specific product, nor is 'the western world' a single entity. When I do Yoga I am not selling my attempt at whatever 'real' yoga is for profit.

This comparison might have made sense, mind you, not much, if I had said that other companies should feel dirty for making tablets after the first one was made.

> Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people?

I agree with this and is a bit stating the obvious. This is, as you say, basically how mankind works.

To be clear I don't think Huawei should be prevented from doing this, I just think it is unauthentic which I don't like. It is purely an expression of my dislike of what they've created not a call to action for some team of lawyers.

Maybe a better example would be when a US company patented basmati rice and wanted to extort India into paying royalties and almost succeeded with it:

https://sciencebusiness.net/news/72228/The-story-of-the-basm...

…or like India broadcasting the IPL cricket back to England?

Because, either no one can clone and customise, or - god forbid - everyone can.

[Oddly its the latter idea that seems to bother many people, even though its clearly and objectively less prejudicial].

Patents by the "western world" is a solution to secrecy.

It's not perfect, but i don't think there's a better way. Corporate silos is exactly what it's trying to fix.

wtf? How can you copy Yoga?! You can copy a design language tho

You wouldn't download a yoga.

Oh sure a specific set of exercise or regime which has a specific effect on body can be a copyright or patent depending on the media and the way they are presented. Like people talking about Ashtang Vinyasa Yoga, Viniyoga, Kundalini Yoga all can be patented in a specific way e.g. [1], obviously need to pay lawyer fee and go to courts to determine later if it can be used to earn money when other party who need to pay do not agree. It waste resources, hamper growth and dissemination of knowledge.

If someone patented the Decimal System or Abacus or Gun powder or Pythogorus Theorem or Fibonnaci Series or Newton patented its laws of motion and anyone using this laws and formula's in any system needs to pay royalty not sure what weird world will be.

Human knowledge stand on the giant shoulders of others and patent and copyright with ever-greening and useless litigation are making it hard and difficult. Can't fathom someone can copyright a rectangle drawing and sue phone companies for launching rectangle phones.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8605152

Jeeze, that's one of the most egregious patents I've seen in a while. Hopefully it wouldn't stand up in a post Alice Corp world.

> Human knowledge stand on the giant shoulders of others and patent and copyright with ever-greening and useless litigation are making it hard and difficult. Can't fathom someone can copyright a rectangle drawing and sue phone companies for launching rectangle phones.

How is this even an argument, given that patents expire?

It is an argument given there is a concept of ever-greening. Also most of the time Patent system stifles the innovation it was designed to encourage [1]

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/patent-system-often-stifle...

> How is this even an argument, given that patents expire?

These days, many patented technologies expire faster than patents on them. In those cases, patents are quite literally halting progress.

Wait, are you saying that because technological progress is too fast, technological progress is slow?

Yes. It's because technological progress is fast in general, halting a particular avenue of development down can cause it to never be pursued again.

Technological progress isn't a line, it's a graph. Someone patents an invention and decides to sit on it, and by the time the patent expires, the entire technological environment has shifted around in a way which makes that invention worthless, and follow-up work unlikely to happen. Whereas, were it not for that patent, the invention would had people extending it further, perhaps generating even more immediately useful technologies.

In this way, a patent - in particular, a defensive patent, taken to prevent anyone from developing a technology that endangers your business - is closing off avenues of progress.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal”

Well those companies put a lot of money into design and customer feedback so it isn't much of a leap to think it will still work even on a new "OS", and Huawei doesn't seem to think it's bound by international copyright laws.

Somebody at Xerox PARC thinks the same about Jobs and Gates every day.

Xerox was allowed to invest in Apple in exchange for that PARC tour.

Let the best win, isn't that our modern capitalism's answer?

If Huawei is copying they will always lag behind. Still, are they really copying? or are they piecing innovations together into a new improved product?

Give them a break and a chance to bring something new - sanctions and all, it is pretty impressive they have persevered.

> If Huawei is copying they will always lag behind.

I think the cause-effect here is reversed. They are copying because they're behind, in this particular area. No doubt they're vigorously defending their own IP in 5G.

Companies, countries, individual race car drivers all slipstream when they're behind. It's a matter pragmatism and economics, not of morality and principles. Recall that Steve Jobs considered Android itself "a stolen product".

China is copying sure but SELLING FOR LESS.

Why is Xiaomi in second place now in Europe? Because their phones are cheap. They are the IKEA of smartphones.

Not only are they cheap, but they are good too. I'm typing this on a Xiaomi Mi 9 SE, which I've had for 2 years now, and it's the best phone I've ever owned - build quality is fantastic (as good as Samsung), it's really fast, and the battery life is amazing - I use it a lot, but only need to charge it every other day.

which is great. Few companies have done more for the wallet of ordinary people than IKEA.

Well I am not sure if it is the case in the long run. In the last century, furniture used to be robust enough to last decades, and could therefore be given for reuse by your descendants or acquaintances. Ikea furniture tends to breakdown much faster.

After my last trip to IKEA I got a different impression. I get a feeling they are starting to cash in on their brand, you can get furniture with better price/quality ratio elswhere.

The founder is dead. IKEA is returning to the mean.

Steve Jobs is dead. Apple is returning to the mean.

Bezos is out. Amazon is returning to the mean.

Google founders are out at Google. Google is returning to the mean.

So there used to be basically 2 classes of furniture in IKEA. The first is the cheap, university student priced stuff that would break after a year or 2. However this was OK because it was not expected to last ages. Then they had their "higher" class stuff that was made of real wood etc that would last 10+ years easily. What I feel has happened in the last 10 years is that the "higher" class stuff has lost quality and is now made of the same crappy material as the cheap stuff.

They might be, but are available to the common user and come with updates, unlike Pixel on most European countries.

A shamefully ignorant article that--like many of the comments here--utterly misses the technical value of HarmonyOS, which I was able to glean in 5 minutes from looking at the official documentation.

Check out the architecture diagram on this page: https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu...

HarmonyOS is evidently not a peer competitor with Android or iOS, but a further abstraction layer above these traditional mobile OS. This is obvious in the fact that HarmonyOS has a "kernel abstraction layer" which supports Linux (Android), LiteOS, etc. The heart of HarmonyOS is not in the particular terminal UI or kernel, but in everything in between--specifically the DSoftBus (from "dbus"?) which ostensibly enables first-class distributed computing across devices.

Based on this basic info, HarmonyOS should be viewed more as a "meta OS", which has been bootstrapped by existing OS-as-backend, Android Linux in the context of phones/tablets, but is not strictly dependent on Android Linux.

Smearing Huawei for this technical approach is like smearing Python as a "C clone" or Clojure as a "Lisp or JVM clone". It's shamefully ignorant.

If you read the article Ars Technica points out the direct lies Huawei is telling: "no single line of code is identical to that of Android," and in the linked original piece of reporting, "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei's top brass doesn't appear to value truthfully disclosing either the provenance of its software or what it actually is so why should I bother with it?

This is likely taken out of context or a misunderstanding. Or are you implying that DSoftBus, KAS were somehow lifted from Android even though they are kernel agnostic?

> Forking Android is not a big deal, and huge companies like Amazon do it for its FireOS. The difference is that Amazon is upfront about it and says "FireOS is a fork of Android" in the first paragraph of its developer documents. Huawei's developer documents don't reference Android and are mostly pure gibberish—and by that I mean they are paragraphs of buzzwords and circular links that don't actually communicate any technical information about what the OS is or how it works.

One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?

If it is, please call me the creator of RobotOSxxx OS (Which really fuzzwords could not may Android) from now on.

Why wouldn’t it be legal? As long as the fork complies with all software licenses.

This happens all the time by large and small companies, orgs and individuals: Amazons FireOS is an Android fork, Amazons opensearch distro is an elasticsearch fork, LibreOffice is an OpenOffice fork, Mate is Gnome3 fork, Jenkins is a Hudson fork, Google’s blink is a fork of WebKit, etc.

I've been reading Chinese posts on the network, a lots of people are actually debating whether or not the OS is related to (not solidly based on) Android due to the confusion. I'm personally also not sure about the fact too, because there is no source code to confirm that.

Based on my understanding of the copyright law and licenses, in addition to keep the same license, the fork must also display/state the original authors in their copyright declarations. There are also implications on the patent front.

> One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?

Only replacing the string would probably not be enough, but if they also addressed trademarks and copyrighted stuff wouldn't that be more or less that CentOS does ?

I don't think so. But it is a Chinese company so its not the first time where they basically just did a copy and replace. Google doesn't wants to piss off the Chinese govt either by trying to shut down Huawei.

Isn’t the whole reason for Harmony to make sure Google can’t shut down Huawei?

Huawei devices shipped with Android before the US banned them from doing so. Whining that they copied an open-source as product as a result is the height of hypocrisy.

Moving running apps across devices is a big security risk. Look up "Mobile Agent" research on Google Scholar. There are some severe security problems with moving running apps between devices. Foremost is the problem of a compromised host that corrupts the apps and then sends them on their way to attack other devices. It is very difficult to protect your app against a corrupt host operating system. There may be some known solutions to the security problems with mobile agents, but I suspect Huawei spent most of the last two years working on other things instead of rewriting Android from the ground up to provide security for running apps that can jump between devices. Even if they did it is all new and not proven in the field. In fact there is another name for apps that can jump between devices, worms. What a great way for an attacker to spread an infection, worm capability built into the OS! And don't tell me it will all be under user control when the app can popup "click here to listen to your music on your TV!" which is a legitimate reason to allow any app to jump devices.

Huawei has "OS Kernel Lab" in their research division [1] and seems to do real research, including building an OS kernel. I guess they at least tried to ditch Android at a point.

I'm not supporting their PR strategy. Just interesting to see where a corporate research goes.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=huawei+OS+Kernel+Lab

The Linux kernel is the singular decent component of Android.

On the contrary, the way Android forces security best practices, by allowing native code only to be used for implementing native methods, enabling all security mechanisms by default, use containerized applications and moving away from ossified POSIX APIs (except for what ISO C and ISO C++ require) are Android's best features.

Oh yeah, I forgot about how that fixed the malware problems on the platform.

Indeeed, it is wonderful when people install outside Play Store and keep giving permissions for everything on flashlight apps.

It doesn't matter where the users are getting the software when the threat model implicitly trusts the OS vendor and makes it difficult for users to install the OS themselves.

Android phones ship with malware installed as root often with no methods for removing it.

I don't consider OEM bundles malware, a practice that goes all the way back the early days of home computing.

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/games/james-bond-007-action-...

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/bundles.html

So malware magically ceases to be malware as soon as it’s preinstalled by the vendor?

It wasn't malware to start it.

> computer software that is designed to damage the way a computer works

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malware

"damage the way the computer works" IMO that includes abusing or denying resources or services on the machine which is very common with preloaded stuff.

Also your definition doesn't capture spyware.

Congrats on reverting home computing back to the amiga days then.

I have walked into target, bought androids, pulled them out of the box and connected them to the network over which they would immediately proceed to download gigabytes of malware from the play store.

That is not malware.

> computer software that is designed to damage the way a computer works

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malware

As home computing being reverted back to the Amiga days, I really look forward to it.

PC, macOS, iOS, Android are devices with a soul, where hardware and software is designed in alongside each other.

Whereas GNU/Linux folks keep trying to put a PDP-11 sh into a mobile phone.

Meh, at this point I'll take a pdp-11 sh on my phone (I use ash actually.) At least it does what I tell it to do unlike most of Android.

Let's not pretend that the Play Store is malware-free. Or that the Android permissions model is flawless.

It is definitely better than default GNU/Linux installations.

It's definitely not. I'm certain I can install and use tools like git on a fresh GNU/Linux install. I can't say the same about Android.

That is completly unrelated to security.

But just to tease your goal post move action, 99.9% of people using Android don't care about using git on their phones, and even if they would.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aor.pocket...

If you only bother with what software people care about why allow installing code outside of the browser? That would much more effectively eliminate security vulnerabilities.

Indeed, https://www.google.com/chromebook/chrome-os/

Ok, well now I can't do most of the stuff I was doing on GNU/Linux without doing it on a machine that someone else is hosting. So that's still a step backward.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...

Want a GNU/Linux phone? Buy Openmoko, or any other commercial failures that followed them.

Is that an admission that it makes sense?

No and is completly irrelevant for the subject of security being discussed.

It's relevant because when I go to use git on android and iOS I go hunting through the play store and download some closed source wrapper around it, often with libraries that the developer pulled in that they don't fully understand the behavior of.

By dramatically raising the cost of software maintenance (by decreasing interoperability and because of the heavy API churn) these systems make community maintained software rare which forces users to turn to organizations that are unwilling (and sometimes unable) to share information with their users.

The resulting security situation is dire.

What? Point me to a single piece of malware in any major distro's repositories; I'll wait.

I'm certain stuff slips through occasionally, there's the random number generator "bug" that made it into debian a decade or so ago. The rate is fantastically lower than pretty much anything else though.

Software most humans care to use on GNU/Linux isn't part of distro repositories.

curl | sudo sh rulez!

Most of it really is.

When you need software that isn't well supported by your OS you're always going to have to apply some degree of care and research. Thinking that any degree of sandboxing or API re-arranging will ever make flinging binaries around safe is extremely naive and counter productive.

Was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27280567

Technically, “was” is wrong because the new Nest Hub doesn’t run any part of Android. These are Flutter apps targeted specifically for Fuschia. There’s no evidence yet that they will run Android on top of Fuschia.

They are actually working on porting the Android Runtime (ART) to Fuchsia. [1]

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/device/google/fuchsia/

Thanks for the link.

Nah, it’s the greatest security vulnerability of the platform.

Even if we ignore the 'censorship first' idiom.

Unlike Microsoft's Fluent, Material U or other UX/UI exploration.

This feels like a pale Apple copycat. oddly it'll become even less relevant by next week with Apple showing their newer UI iteration.

>Only Secure Apps Apply

>When you enable Pure Mode on HarmonyOS 2, only apps that have undergone the stringent testing for listing in the HUAWEI AppGallery can be installed. And for an even higher layer of security, installed apps are constantly monitored to detect potential risks and security infringements.

At least you can turn the BS down on this one unlike iOS.

Also that page lagged a bit on my pinephone.

No page lag on my kids' iPhone 4s.

I really love my pinephone, but frankly, what doesn’t lag on it?

Hackernews, dino, FVWM, and vim don't.

If I don't take it slow and give my Pinephone (Community edition with 3 gig of RAM) time to think, I've seen hckrnews crash Firefox on my Pinephone.

Try a good WM like FVWM. Phosh is crazy slow.

The only possible explanation for the way Huawei design their UI is to try and trick the non tech savvy into thinking they're buying something that runs the same software as Apple products.

You underestimate the cognitive ability of the masses.

10/10 of people I know buy for the brand.

Well that's exactly my point. They're entire marketing & product strategy seems to be to convince people their stuff has the same reputation / quality as Apple.

And? A brand cannot stand on marketing alone.

And what? What point do you think you’re arguing with me about?

I've bought Huawei phones and tablets in the past. I don't care one whit about the default UI. Samsung's sucked for years before OneUI. LG Mobile (RIP) wasn't good either.

The best part of Android is that you can make the interface look however you want.

I mean I just don’t like the practice. Get some originality.

I’d be much more concerned about embedded spyware.

My building has cameras everywhere, and my internet traffic is passed around for anybody in the Five Eyes community to access as they please. I'm not worried about the China boogeyman knowing what Youtube videos I watched.

> but China doesn't do huge amounts of software development.

It’s actually the first time I rethink whether there is a shortage of developers in China or not. Sheer amount there are tons of developers and the tech industry is pretty huge in China. However most are doing “application development”, definitely lacking experts from several fundamental domains (kernel, cloud backbone, etc).

Another aspect is they earned much less compared to US though still 1-2x for other type of jobs. However, many senior/principal engineers in FAANG still went back because the scope is substantially larger (you oversee 5-10x more headcount normally)

So when I looked at HarmonyOS when it was announced open source it had nothing to do with Android at all. It was much more Fuchsia like. A modern secure microkernel, message passing and it's own javascript engine, very few drivers. Not exciting, just solid. The total opposite to Android or Samsung.

https://gitee.com/openharmony

This could have been the one renamed to openharmony and LiteOS.

the world is then left with one single Android smart-phone maker that's not from China and competitive: Samsung.

Interesting remark but not really related to this piece of news, am I wrong?

What about Google itself?

I'm welcoming any competition to the app store duopoly.

I'm excited about Ubuntu Touch [1] as well. It's open source and hopefully does integrate well with Ubuntu Desktop. Would like to see a "Ubuntu App Store" as well.

[1] https://ubports.com/

Some more hints at what’s in it in the technical release notes:

https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/release-no...

Looks they have added a new JS UI framework at os level. Probably to replace Android eventually.

Going pure JS (rather than Android Java or something else) I think will be a big plus for developer adaption.

If I'm not mistaken java can still be used according to the HarmonyOS developer documentation. Hope they will add a wasm runtime in the future. Might be interesting to see how a third non western eco system will develop over the year.

But they should release their sdk in the west soon so people might start tinkering.

There is some stuff here:

https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/tree/master/docker

What exactly is a bit unclear and I don't know why it is inside the docs repository.

I just saw they released their SDK and DevEco intellij clone for people outside of China.

I am very curious about their JS based UI framework (that is referenced in their 2.0 canary release notes). Have you seen anything on this? (Examples etc.)

It appears to be documented here:

https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/tree/master/en/applicatio...

Some example code here:

https://gitee.com/openharmony/docs/blob/master/en/applicatio...

Apparently made very web like with ui layouts described in hml Huawei markup language rather than html.

Also lots of low level access - you can query the temperature of the battery via one of the apis.

I think its described over here in the docs:

https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/docs/documentation/doc-gu...

Looks like iPadOS to me.

more details here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/huaweis-harmonyos-wi...

Thanks - that seems more informative than the corporate page, so I've switched the URL from https://consumer.huawei.com/en/harmonyos/.

It is also kinda biased and just stuck at the old this just a copy of Android record.

For example the release notes mentions a new JS UI framework at the OS level with the potential to replace Android Java completely.

Had Google or Apple done this it would be sitting pretty on the hn front page for days.

Here it is just ignored in the politics of Huawei.

You may well be right; I don't know any of the details. The problem is that there don't seem to be any good URLs, by which I mean ones that would provide a good basis for objective, interesting discussion. Maybe one will turn up.

You could try submitting the documentation/demo page for that new JS UI framework.

I did submit this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378926

Which has some example code - as I understand it the apps will look just like android apps.

Fancy! I don't understand who would in their right mind, except for web devs, prefer this to Kotlin + Compose.

I would use it.

There are just far more JavaScript developers out there than android Java/kotlin developers.

Also if you just distribute the js, the apps would get quite small, so maybe you no longer need an App Store with an explicit installation step but instead you could just browse the apps on the internet like you would browse web pages.

Aside from the fact no show case of a phone interface

Just from the ars article alone I have extreme doubt of what the phone system(AOSP copy job) on release is the same as the code in open harmony repos

ooh it looks like you can download the sdk from here: https://developer.harmonyos.com/en/develop/deveco-studio

Might give it a spin this weekend.

I appreciate the gesture but app developers in the West are firmly and irrevocably slaves to Google.

I think you'll find it's consumers who are actually slaves to Apple and Google. Developers are not particularly happy to use iOS or Android, there is simply no commercially-viable alternative.

Seems like an ad paid for by Google, or a very clear example of servilism and bad journalism. If anything "I have no idea what X is" written with such pride as if the job of a "journalist" is not to understand and report stuff

I am wondering if some company official (or perhaps Communist party official) told the team in charge of HarmonyOS you must come up with a completely new OS that is 100% Android compatible, and that is the reason behind this odd strategy

So "Harmony OS" is official, but I don't get it. - Their watches run a "LiteOS kernel" - Their tablets and phones run a Linux kernel - An "open Harmony" project exists with an actual HOS kernel, but doesn't currently run on any devices - Yet all of these are somehow Harmony OS?

Brand names are not a hash on the source code of the kernel, so they can do whatever they want.

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