Huawei's long-rumored Android alternative, Hongmeng, is finally official. At today's Huawei Developer Conference, the company's Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu surprised the audience by unveiling "Harmony OS," which is said to be faster and safer than Android. While the software is primarily aimed at IoT products (such as smart displays, wearables, smart speakers and cars) instead of smartphones, Yu stated that when Huawei can no longer access Google's Android ecosystem, it can deploy Harmony OS "at any time." Until then, Huawei will continue to support Android.
Yu's own presentation was rather technical, but in a nutshell, Harmony OS is positioned as a future-proof, "microkernel-based, distributed OS for all scenarios." The platform is open source, and it's actually more of a competitor to Google's upcoming Fuchsia, given that both are microkernel-based and can be deployed to multiple types of devices at once. In contrast, Android isn't as efficient due to its redundant codes, outdated scheduling mechanism and general fragmentation issues.
With a microkernel design, Harmony OS is said to be safer from the get-go as there is no root access available -- the microkernel is protected by isolation from external kernel services. The system also applies formal verification -- a set of mathematical approaches used in security-critical fields -- to reliably spot vulnerabilities, whereas traditional methods are likely to miss some spots.
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via https://www.aiupnow.com
, Khareem Sudlow
