Stable EMUI 11 hints towards HarmonyOS upgrade, Android exclusion could be possible

Huawei has rolled out EMUI 11 for the Huawei P40, Mate 30, and MatePad Pro series in China, and the company is now preparing the stable EMUI 11 for the Huawei P40 and Mate 30 series in Europe.

Aside from its Chinese counterpart, the stable EMUI 11 for the Huawei P40, P40 Pro, P40 Pro Plus, and Mate 30 Pro devices in Europe has some important changes that you should know about.

Recently, HuaweiAilesi got access to the stable EMUI 11 build for Huawei P40 Pro and evaluated some of the key features offered by this EMUI version including some signs of HarmonyOS aka Hongmeng OS upgrade and the exclusions of Android branding.

After the stable EMUI 11 upgrade, the boot screen shows no sign of the official “Powered by Android” logo instead it now shows that in simple text/fonts, which is completely new and we’ve not seen that before.

Boot screen on Huawei P40 Pro (New = EMUI 11, Old = EMUI 10.1)

Next, EMUI 11 has also changed the way that it shows the security patch level on the phone’s about section, which is now labeled as only Security patch level, which was previously “Android Security Patch Level”. However, it’s known the full exclusion of Android in Huawei devices is currently not possible but ‘partial’ is a term that you fit in this context.

Huawei P40 and Mate 30 series are the first devices to launch on pure Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and have no Google Mobile Services (GMS) pre-installed. However, these devices still run AOSP Android 10 based EMUI 10.

EMUI 10 was based on distributed technologies same as the HarmonyOS and with EMUI 11, Huawei closed the distance between the two software ecosystems by further strengthening the distributed technology on EMUI 11 and supported devices.

On the other hand, we’ve noted that the recently launched, Huawei Mate 40 series comes pre-installed with EMUI 11 but retains the old “Powered by Android” logo. However, the Huawei Mate 40 series alongside the upcoming P50 likely to get the initial slot in the HarmonyOS smartphone beta testing.

Nothing is certain at the moment and the evaluation done above could be taken as a grain of salt but we’ll have to wait further to get the final answer when Huawei starts testing the HarmonyOS in smartphones.