With the release of HarmonyOS NEXT, Huawei officially separates from Android.

Huawei has now officially launched HarmonyOS Next as its own operating system. The launch is symbolic, as it finally signals a formal divorce by Huawei from the Android ecosystem that has been the main operating system of so many smartphones around the world.

Huawei will also cease to support applications designed for Android with this new operating system—a fact that clearly shows a new strategic turn. Due to this, Huawei teamed up with major Chinese companies like Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com to develop HarmonyOS Next-dedicated apps. That would mean the users of the new operating system will have a number of native applications running smoothly on their OS.

During its announcement, Huawei claimed there were more than 15,000 native applications and services available to HarmonyOS users. This number is impressive, but still a lot too few compared to the millions found on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. HarmonyOS Next has a lot of coding, something near 110 million lines of code. According to Huawei, this huge coding can improve the performance of the devices by about 30%, meaning that smartphones with HarmonyOS Next may be much faster and more powerful.

Contrary to earlier plans to expand HarmonyOS into international markets, such as those outside of China, Huawei has come out to ensure that HarmonyOS NEXT will be specific to China only, serving as a dichotomy to earlier plans of taking an earlier HarmonyOS to international users. Still, there have been reports of companies from outside the mainland—Singapore’s Grab and the airline Emirates, for example—who have developed applications for the HarmonyOS platform.

In any event, to some extent, the release of HarmonyOS Next is significant given the broader China movement to attain technological independence. That is so because HarmonyOS previously needed to lean on the Android Open Source Project for its vital functionalities. Huawei, with this new operating system, tries to reduce its dependency on foreign technology and develop its ecosystem.

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