George Zhao, president of Huawei's sub-brand Honor, unveils Honor Vision series during the Huawei Developer Conference held in Dongguan, South China's Guangdong province on Aug 10, 2019. Photo/Xinhua]

“Harmony OS is completely different from Android and iOS,” said Richard Yu, head of Chinese tech giant Huawei’s consumer business group, when describing the much-anticipated in-house operating system Harmony OS.

The operating system was released by Huawei earlier this month in Dongguan, south China’s Guangdong province at the company’s annual developer conference.

Based on the microkernel design, the system can be distributed to all scenarios, as well as offer smooth experiences and higher levels of security and collaboration across devices, Yu said in an interview.

“The Harmony OS is developed for the future,” he stressed, adding that the operating system can help Huawei improve its capability to support full scenarios across multiple devices and platforms, and the capacity to address low-latency and high-security challenges.

According to Yu, the very first exploration of the Harmony OS started 10 years ago. The system was planned to be launched in the coming spring, but was accelerated by US sanctions, he said.

“We have the world’s best operation system developers, and leading architects and designers of the next-generation operation system,” Yu said, referring to the over 4,000 developers currently working for Harmony OS.

According to Huawei’s plan, the Harmony OS will launch a 2.0 version the next year for innovative PCs, smartwatches and wristbands, and in-vehicle infotainment systems. The operation will be further upgraded in 2021 for better collaboration between software and hardware.

Compared with other systems such as Android, the Harmony OS still lacks a robust ecology. In this regard, Huawei invited over 6,000 global developers to its developer conference – the most in the company’s history. In addition, Huawei also announced a talent development program that will see $1 billion invested to cultivate global developers, in an attempt to establish an incentive mechanism with ecology partners and support the innovation of global developers.

According to Huawei’s plan, the Harmony OS will be made into a global operating system. “Once we open the source, the system does not belong to Huawei. We hope that the system will be applied not only in China, but also the world at large,” said Zhang Ping’an, president of Huawei’s Consumer Business Cloud Services.