OpenHarmony 4.0 Beta 1 Launched with new features

The open-source version of Huawei HarmonyOS, OpenHarmony 4.0 Beta 1 is now launched for the open-source software community. This version brings new features and enhancements to this software.

According to the changelog, OpenHarmony 4.0 beta 1 standard system capabilities continue to improve. The ArkUI further improves component capabilities and effects, and application framework optimizations.

It also empowers extension capabilities, and application packages support non-decompression installation and cross-application sharing, distributed data management adds a unified data management framework (UDMF) to further enhance the capabilities of audio/media playback/media control/camera.

OpenHarmony 4.0 beta 1 address application corner mark management for event notification, and support more key management capabilities for basic security capabilities. ArkCompiler has updated the relevant tool versions of the C++ tool chain and has multiple test frameworks and enhanced tool capabilities.

To be mentioned, this new OpenHarmony build also markets the beginning of the API Level 10 interface.

Although it has a super large changelog, but below you can check a few of the changes in advance.

ArkUI

1. Provide the Extension component, which is used to embed the extended function of one application into another application.
2. Support setting spherical high-order attributes, lower edge pixel expansion, color blur, G2 rounded corners, shadows, and gradient high-order attributes. 5.
   The drawing component supports offset/clipping/mask properties.
3. The component supports default feature animation.
4. The component supports default drag and drop and supports turning off default drag and drop.
5. The custom bullet box supports the customization of mask color and pop-up animation.
6. bindContextMenu/bindMenu supports custom locations.
7. The ColumnSplit divider supports dragging. The Refresh component supports custom pull-down refresh capability.
8. Support the ability to measure the width and height of strings.

App framework

• Minimize the management of Extension capabilities, support various Extensions to open APIs according to business scenarios, and prevent sensitive API calls.
• Support temporary authorization of data or file URI.
• Provide a UIExtension mechanism, with which an application can embed its own application into another application for display.
• Provide atomic service and card sharing interface, support the sharing and data recovery of atomic service.

App package management

• Support the feature of application package installation without decompression, which optimizes system startup performance and application installation performance.
• Support sharing packages across applications. Some systems are supported to provide the code capabilities of their own applications to third-party ecological applications, and the third-party applications do not need to be integrated into their own installation packages
• Relevant content (including code, resources, and .so files, etc.), so as to reduce the integration cost and update cost of ecological applications.
• Support the installation of enterprise applications. Verify the installation permissions of enterprise applications to prevent enterprise applications from being distributed and installed at will; provide enterprise application certificate information query to facilitate the application market Management and revocation of enterprise applications.

Distributed Data Management

1. The system application supports silent access to the DataShareExtension data of other system applications through the data management service agent, that is, the data of the application DataShareExtension can be accessed
   without launching the application where the DataShareExtension is located.
2. The system application supports accessing the data of the Single mode application DataShareExtension through the data management service agent.
3. The DataShare client provides the ability to subscribe to DataShareExtension data changes according to the URI prefix, and any DataShareExtension data under the subscribed URI prefix occurs changes are notified to the DataShare client.
4. Added a unified data management framework (Unified Data Management Framework, UDMF), which supports data standardization model, data drag and drop in the device, UDMF data storage
   adaptation, rights management, and lifecycle management.

File management

• Files are presented in a classified view, and media files do not need to pay attention to the specific storage location.
• Provide the ability to allow applications that need to manage or use media files, such as the gallery, to manage media files in the form of albums, and provide the function of adding and removing media files in the album.
• Enhance the ability of the file backup and recovery framework, clone applications or DEMO applications can call ArkTS API to achieve backup and recovery functions.
• Enhance FilelO access capability, support listFile, scanFile, move.copy, filelock.watcher capabilities.
• Provide URI-based file temporary authorization access and deauthorization capabilities, support URI-based unified file opening capabilities, and facilitate applications to access required files flexibly and securely.

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