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[Update: Sep 20] HarmonyOS 2.0 update tracker: HongMeng OS 2.0 Release date, beta, & other info

This story is being continuously updated…. New updates are being added at the bottom…..

It is being reported that the user interface on HarmonyOS 2.0 for Honor Smart TVs is expected to roll out in December of this year. This is expected to bring a number of features from the mobile division of Harmony OS.

Update 6 (September 18)

It is being reported that the Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro will be the first smartwatch to launch equipped with the Hongmeng OS. The device is set to launch in China soon and it will spot wireless charging and luxury design.

Update 7 (September 23)

In a classic no-man-is-an-island move, Huawei has announced that it plans to open up Huawei Mobile Services and HarmonyOS to rival manufacturers.

Will HarmonyOS 2.0 be compelling enough for Android OEMs to switch camps? All we can do is wait and see.

Update 8 (September 26)

05:16 pm (IST): A recent report suggests that Huawei is planning to upgrade its smartphones to Harmony OS fully by next year. Thus, the company would only release Harmony OS powered devices thereafter.

Original story (published on September 24, 2020) follows:

According to data from Statcounter, Huawei has, over the past year, been holding steady at about 10% of the global Mobile Vendor Market Share, trailing behind Korean tech giant Samsung at about 31% and Apple at 25% market share.

This is rather impressive, especially seeing as Huawei’s sales outside of China have been greatly handicapped owing to the ongoing tension between the Chinese tech giant and the U.S.

One of the biggest bones of contentions has resulted in Huawei devices shipping without Google Play services, a huge hamartia for users outside China.

This has since led to Huawei questioning its over-reliance on US tech giant, Google, and the Android platform. With that, Huawei has been working on its in-house operating system to replace Android as its platform of choice.

HongMeng OS, or Harmony OS, is Huawei’s attempt at building its own platform from scratch. Huawei is a huge company and if anyone is able to pull this off, it might as well be this industry titan. So what is the progress so far? Well, in this tracker, we shall be looking at the key milestones in the development of Harmony OS 2.0.

We already know that Harmony OS 2.0 is coming in 2021 and we’ve since seen reports that it could be coming to even more platforms.

Update 1 (September 10)

Harmony OS Official website is live and you can access it here.

This website allows users and developers to download the open-source code for Hongmeng OS. This can be done using one of the following methods.

1: Download the compressed file from the mirror site (recommended)
2: Component acquisition from the HPM website. Through HPM, find solutions that meet your needs, select/cut components and download them.
3: Use the package manager command line tool to obtain. Use HPM’s hpm-cli command line tool to execute command download.
4: Obtain from the code warehouse. Download from the code repository through repo or git tools.

Update 2 (September 11)
IST: 10:30 am: At Huawei Developer Conference (HDC) 2020 on September 11, it has been announced that Hongmeng OS is already available across more than 20 product categories. Cumulatively, these account for 12 million third-party products.
Further, the company estimates that this number is expected to exceed 100 million by end of 2020. Ambitious, but if this is true, then Hongmeng OS might already have a viable userbase and this could form the foundation for all future HongMeng OS ventures.
For a highlight of other announcements made at HDC 2020, check out this summarised rundown of the same.
IST: 12:30 pm: In an interview following the Huawei Developer Conference held on September 11 in China, Yang Haisong, Vice President of Huawei’s Software Department announced that Hongmeng OS requires as little as 128kB of RAM to operate.

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