Huawei Announces That HarmonyOS 2.0 Will Be Launched On June 2

Huawei wants to launch its first own mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets on the market in a week. For the time being, it is unlikely to be a completely in-house development, but a kind of Android derivative, contrary to what might previously have been assumed.

The Chinese mobile communications supplier Huawei wants to give the go-ahead for the commercial launch of Harmony OS 2.0 on June 2nd, which is to replace the official Android on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones in the medium term. Huawei cannot use a “completely normal” Android with Google’s apps and services because of the US sanctions against the group that remain unchanged.

Instead, Huawei has been developing its own alternative, Harmony OS, for several years now, which at least so far has always been said to be an independent operating system. In the meantime, however, it has turned out that HarmonyOS 2 is nothing more than a more or less modified version of Android, at least for the time being. Huawei has now published a video via its channel on the Chinese Twitter counterpart Weibo announcing that Harmony OS 2.0 will be launched on June 2, 2021. It is still unclear whether this is an event only for China or an international event.

Harmony OS is to be used in the long term as an independent alternative to Android on various Huawei products. Among other things, the company also equips televisions and smartwatches with it.

While Huawei gives the impression that it is an in-house development in all promotional activities related to the operating system, users of the developer version quickly realized that this is initially just a kind of modified Android 10 with Huawei’s EMUI, which has been given some additional functions.