Huawei’s Harmony OS is yet to be used in any phone, but a new report predicted it will become one of the world’s largest next year.
Counterpoint Research said in its latest report that the market share of Harmony OS will reach 2 percent globally next year, making it the world’s fifth largest operating system surpassing Linux.
Counterpoint said the share of Harmony OS in China will reach 0.1 percent by the end of this year and 5 percent by the end of next year.
Android is currently the world’s leading operating system with a market share of 39 percent, followed by Windows having 35 percent market share, Apple’s iOS with 13.87 percent market share, and macOS with 5.92 percent market share.
Linux is currently the fifth largest operating system with 0.77 percent share.
Huawei unveiled the Harmony OS in August at the "Huawei Developer Conference 2019," where the company gave a Chinese-language presentation on Harmony OS, giving a vague overview with no screenshots or demos.
Harmony OS isn‘t quite targeting smartphones yet, and the OS first debuted on the "Honor Smart Screen" and Huawei TVs released in September.
Huawei said an expansion to smartphones could happen sometime over the next three years, but for now, it wants to stick with Android.
As for what Harmony OS actually is, the company described it as "a microkernel-based OS, distributed OS for all scenarios." Huawei says the OS will run across a range of form factors, and the company even pulled out the old "write once, run everywhere" claim for app developers.
Huawei spent some time the competition, saying Android‘s Linux kernel uses a resource scheduling model "targeting server load" and lacks UI smoothness as a result. In contrast, Huawei promised Harmony would have a faster and more responsive UI.
HarmonyOS will be open source, so hopefully we will see some third-party code reviews once the repo is posted.
