People thinks Hongmeng OS is a reskinned Android but in reality, they don’t have an understanding of open source software

Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei’s Consumer Business Software Department recently gave an interview to the Chinese media and it revealed so much information about the Hongmeng OS (HarmonyOS) software.

Under his topics, Wang also put a spotlight on the conversation whether “HarmonyOS is a copy of Android”. Wang said the way everyone questioning whether Hongmeng OS is a nutshell of Android, shows that the technological circles have insufficient understanding of open-source software.

Not all Android code is developed by Google, most of the code comes from the open-source community. Hongmeng OS will also use the excellent technology and code strength of the community.

“By projecting the source code of AOSP (Android Open Source Project) as the base of Hongmeng OS and judging that Huawei has only changed the skin of Android, reveals that people have less understanding of open source software.” said Wang 

Reports from the media claim that Huawei has used Android as a base of Hongmeng OS and it’s just reskinned. However, Wang has also refused these reports before.

In October this year, Huawei will launch the third version of Hongmeng OS, and the code from the AOSP community and the contributed by Google is almost gone.

Wang also mentioned that the challenge of developing an operating system lies not in technology but in the ecosystem. Only one company can make technology but it is unlikely to make the ecosystem. This is why it’s not possible for everyone to understand the difference.

Wang said Huawei will install Hongmeng OS in 300 million devices this year. Among these, there will be 200 million smartphones, and more than 30 million units include smartwatches, smart screens, tablets, smart speakers as well as third-party products.

Launch in April:

During a launch event in February, Huawei announced that HarmonyOS will launch in April and the Huawei Mate X2 will in the first batch of devices to install this latest operating system. However, an official list of devices will be announced during the launch.

Wang Chenglu said that the Hongmeng OS ecosystem development has been very important in the past two years. Currently, Huawei has hundreds of millions of Huawei phone users and if old users upgrade to HarmonyOS, they may stay.