It’s getting close to two years since the banhammer was brought down on Huawei working with Google, a period that has seen the smartphone manufacturer lose much of the ground it had gained with the release of blockbuster handsets such as the P30 Pro and Mate 20 Pro. During this timeframe, Huawei referenced the development of a ‘Plan B’ operating system that would be called ‘HarmonyOS‘ and work on everything from IoT devices to smartphones, wearables, and more.
According to Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica who, after an invasive background check, gained online access to a device running on HarmonyOS somewhere in China, it appears that HarmonyOS is really just Android 10 with the EMUI interface and a few tweaks.
After submitting his passport and copies of his credit, Amadeo was allowed to virtually access the device running HarmonyOS. With Huawei restricting users from downloading the operating system, it’s the only way to access the platform which runs as an emulator on an unspecified device, which is frankly ludicrous but somewhat understandable when you consider what the Ars Technica writer discovered.
Which was pretty much a whole load of nothing, in essence. After accessing the device, Amadeo dug around in its innards and found references to Android and even exact copies of its features such as dark mode, gesture navigation, and notification panel. Any mention of Android has been removed, but there are still remnants of Google’s OS lingering in the background such as the app info for the “HarmonyOS System” package that uses an Android system icon and has a label saying “version 10”, not HarmonyOS 2.0.
The expose on Huawei’s HarmonyOS is in-depth and well worth reading over on the Ars Technica site (here).
