Huawei’s Harmony OS won’t be fully available until October next year

Anyone hoping Huawei will challenge the smartphone OS duopoly anytime soon is likely to be disappointed.

Huawei held its developer conference today, at which the hot topic was Harmony OS, the in-house smartphone operating system Huawei is in a hurry to develop in the face of mounting US sanctions. Rome wasn’t built in a day, however, and Wang Chenglu, President of Software Development at Huawei Consumer Group revealed that the platform won’t be fully opened to smartphone developers until October next year.

There haven’t been any press releases or helpful things like that, so the news is taken from the livestream of the developer conference, which you can see below, with the specific revelation at around the 47 minute mark. The rest of the marathon session was mainly taken up with talking up Harmony in an apparent bid to urge the assembled developers to be patient.

In the shorter term it seems Harmony does already work with simpler smart devices. The other major session of the conference so far was devoted to Seamless AI Life, which seems to be how Huawei refers to its smart home and connected peripherals portfolio, some of which may use Harmony. You can see the video of that below too.