Hongmeng's rise is a victory for long-termists

HarmonyOS NEXT Hongmeng Galaxy Edition was released and is open to developers for application;

Huawei's "Star Project" will invest 7 billion yuan to encourage Hongmeng developers to innovate in Hongmeng native applications, meta-services, SDKs, etc.

The 2024 HarmonyOS Innovation Competition has been launched, with a maximum single award of 1 million yuan, providing developers with an open platform for continuous advancement through competition.

The Hongmeng Galaxy Edition is expected to release a developer Beta version in Q2 2024 and a commercial version for consumers in Q4;

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At the "Hongmeng Ecosystem Thousand Sails Launch Ceremony" on January 18, a series of blockbuster news were released in just one and a half hours, which settled the speculation about "Hongmeng decoupling from Android" in recent months. The operating system, which has been honed for ten years, will bring the Hongmeng ecosystem to the next stage. In the words of Richard Yu, the Hongmeng ecosystem has been determined, and the sky full of stars will eventually merge into a dazzling galaxy.

Hongmeng, a product that emerged during Huawei's darkest hour, has, as its name suggests, truly opened up a new path in the chaos.

Hongmeng, for the interconnection of all things

Back in August 2019, the Hongmeng operating system was officially unveiled at the Huawei Developer Conference.

At that time, Huawei's terminals were facing the strongest sanctions and blockades in history. Against the backdrop of an expected sharp drop in terminal market shipments, Hongmeng quickly came to the fore. Yu Chengdong also admitted that HarmonyOS was originally planned to be released in the spring of next year, but the US sanctions accelerated the process.

Many people think that the launch of Hongmeng seems to be a helpless move under the external "siege and blockade". But in fact, in 2015, Hongmeng was launched, in addition to the rigid demand for "autonomy and control", it was also because Huawei saw the opportunity in the era of the Internet of Everything.

Before Hongmeng, there were many challengers in the field of mobile operating systems dominated by iOS and Android ecosystems. Developing an operating system may not be difficult, but the investment and difficulty of opening up a new path around iOS and Android ecosystems can be imagined. Huawei can take this "road less traveled" largely due to its leading understanding of communications.

With the advent of the all-scenario intelligent era, Huawei believes that it is necessary to further enhance the cross-platform capabilities of the operating system, including the ability to support all scenarios, across multiple devices and platforms, and the ability to cope with low latency and high security challenges. Therefore, the prototype of HarmonyOS has gradually taken shape.

The concept of "one system breaks through the boundaries of the digital world" has helped Hongmeng form a strong advantage: using only one development language, it can create innovative applications across systems and terminals; only one development is required to complete multi-terminal deployment, covering Huawei's massive intelligent full-scenario terminal system.

In 2019, HarmonyOS was officially released at the Huawei Developer Conference and was first used on smart large screens, marking the start of its commercialization; in 2020, HarmonyOS 2 was expanded to smart screens, smart wearables, and car products, and its distributed capabilities were significantly upgraded; from the end of 2020 to the middle of 2021, Hongmeng officially landed in the smartphone field, ushering in a period of rapid growth; in 2021, HarmonyOS 3 was unveiled at the Huawei Developer Conference, ushering in the era of the intelligent connection of all things. In 2023, with the release of HarmonyOS 4, the focus of the update became personalization, fluency, and security, as well as Huawei Xiaoyi equipped with a large AI model. So far, Huawei HarmonyOS has created the most complete consumer ecosystem in the industry, including mobile phones, tablets, PCs, watches, cars, etc., and has completed the comprehensive integration of a complex operating ecosystem.

At the same time, Hongmeng ecosystem devices have also achieved substantial growth. Yu Chengdong revealed that at the Huawei Developer Conference in August 2023, the number of Hongmeng ecosystem devices was 700 million. In less than half a year, this number has exceeded 800 million, which also means that Hongmeng will open up a new blue ocean of trillion-dollar industries.

Whether in terms of technical strength or market share, it is undeniable that Hongmeng has become the third largest mobile phone operating system after Android and iOS.

New stage, based on the independent Hongmeng kernel

Since its birth, Hongmeng has been controversially accused of being an "Android shell" because both Android and Hongmeng are developed based on the Android open source project ASOP. The code in ASOP is jointly maintained and developed by many developers around the world. Huawei is also one of the providers of the code. Anyone can freely use and modify it under the open source license agreement.

However, HarmonyOS NEXT is a pure version independent of the traditional Linux kernel and Android open source project code. It removes the traditional AOSP code and reduces 40% of redundant code. It runs on the Hongmeng kernel and supports the same system applications. According to Yu Chengdong, HarmonyOS goes deep into the root, comprehensively breaks through the core technologies such as the operating system kernel, AI large models, AI frameworks and compilers, and programming languages, laying a solid foundation for ecological construction. In particular, the Hongmeng kernel, which surpasses the traditional kernel, has more flexibility, security, and smoothness, and is more adaptable to the diversity of all-scenario devices.

In Huawei's view, we have entered the era of all scenarios in 2024. The Hongmeng Galaxy Edition will become the first operating system in history to connect hardware and scenarios, support diverse interactions, and flow freely. It will achieve six native experiences: native refinement, native ease of use, native fluency, native security, native intelligence, and native connectivity. It will not only bring endless creativity to developers, but also bring a cross-era experience to consumers.

The native intelligence features of the end-cloud collaboration of the Hongmeng Galaxy Edition can support applications to use large model capabilities efficiently and safely. Hongmeng native intelligence can be called with as little as "one line of code", allowing developers to apply AI at "zero cost". At the same time, its innovative system-based capabilities of meta-service integration allow developers to access the Hongmeng native ecosystem in one step. By calling the meta-service API set and the low-code capabilities of graphical interface drag and drop, the development of meta-services can be completed in as fast as one day.

In addition, relying on the new "heterogeneous native" parallel mechanism of the Hongmeng kernel, it can bring extreme fluency beyond the traditional kernel and increase the memory management efficiency by 3 times. The improvement of management efficiency means faster response speed for consumers, which greatly improves the consumer experience.

In response to the security issues that consumers are concerned about, Hongmeng has innovated its privacy architecture and greatly reduced the number of pop-up authorizations, thus reducing the risk of privacy leakage from the root and comprehensively improving consumers' perception of privacy protection, making the experience simpler and privacy more secure. The outstanding security capabilities of the Hongmeng kernel have been highly recognized by the industry, and it has obtained the world's first CC EAL 6+ certificate in the field of smart terminal operating systems, the highest level of automotive safety certification ASIL-D, and the functional safety certification IEC 61508 in the industrial field.

As China's own operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT is a culmination of all its achievements and will also be a milestone in the development history of HarmonyOS.

If the ecosystem is successful, then Hongmeng will be successful

"Only an operating system with a base and an ecosystem is a true operating system." For any operating system, ecosystem comes first, and Hongmeng is no exception.

Gong Ti said, "If building the Hongmeng operating system is one of the three major battles, two have been completed. The Hongmeng base has more than 100 million lines of code, more than 20,000 APIs, more than 800 million Hongmeng ecological devices, and a differentiated user experience has been established. The third battle is the ecosystem. If the ecosystem succeeds, Hongmeng will succeed."

Since Huawei announced last September that HarmonyOS NEXT was ready to go and Hongmeng native applications were fully launched, the first batch of more than 200 Hongmeng native applications have been accelerated, covering convenient life, travel and tourism, financial convenience, social information, productivity tools, audio and video entertainment, games and other fields. The Hongmeng native application map has basically taken shape. At the same time, partners such as Ant Group, China UnionPay, and iFlytek have also opened up vertical innovation capabilities and collaborated with Huawei's base capabilities to provide developers with efficient full-link development tools, which can reduce development workload by up to 90%, helping the industry to accelerate the development of Hongmeng applications. Partners can also quickly access the Hongmeng ecosystem through the minimalist development of meta-services. This also means that now is the best time for application manufacturers to accelerate Hongmeng and move towards a full-scenario future.

A steady stream of talent is also an inexhaustible driving force for the growth and advancement of the ecosystem. In terms of talent training, students from 305 universities have participated in Hongmeng activities, Hongmeng campus open courses have entered 135 universities, 286 companies have participated in Hongmeng Ecological School, more than 380,000 developers have passed Hongmeng certification, and more than 150 industry-university cooperation projects have provided a well-stocked "granary" for the continuous innovation and prosperous development of the Hongmeng ecosystem.

In order to further boost the development momentum of the HarmonyOS ecosystem, Huawei announced that the "Star Plan" will invest 7 billion yuan to encourage innovations in HarmonyOS developers in HarmonyOS native applications, meta-services, SDKs, etc. At the same time, Huawei will work with partners to cultivate more than 100,000 HarmonyOS developers per month through methods such as the HarmonyOS Ecological Academy, universities jointly cultivating HarmonyOS talents, and cities issuing HarmonyOS talent training policies. It also announced the launch of the 2024 HarmonyOS Innovation Competition, with a maximum single award of 1 million yuan, providing developers with an open platform for continuous advancement through competition.

With a multi-pronged approach, 2024 is bound to be a critical year for native Hongmeng.

Final Thoughts

"Twinkle, twinkle little star, the sky is full of little stars." The ending song of the launching ceremony corresponds to the ecological picture of Hongmeng today where "the sky is full of stars forming a dazzling galaxy."

Ten years ago, when Huawei started to develop Hongmeng, I think most people were not optimistic. Zhou Hongyi commented that Huawei "always set the highest goal, tackled the most difficult bone, and finally got it done with a long-termist spirit." Fortunately, the right but difficult thing of developing an independent and controllable operating system was handed over to a long-termist like Huawei.