Huawei devices will lose support for Android apps later this year in ‘HarmonyOS NEXT’

Ben Schoon | Jun 24 2024 - 7:44 am PT

Following its reveal last year, Huawei this week announced plans to go all-in with HarmonyOS NEXT, a new platform which removes support for Android apps entirely.

Since the ban that changed Huawei’s entire business in 2020, the company has been building out HarmonyOS as its own platform for phones, tablets, and more. HarmonyOS started off as little more than an Android fork, but has evolved in the time since, with its biggest change coming in the form of HarmonyOS NEXT.

This latest update was announced in 2023 and, while it still visually looks like the Android-based platform Huawei has been using this whole time, it lacked a key feature.

It doesn’t support Android apps.

Through late 2023, the rush for developers to create versions of their apps for HarmonyOS NEXT was widely reported, with developers needing to port their work to a new app format to make them compatible with Huawei devices going forward.

Now, as GizmoChina reports, Huawei is going all-in on HarmonyOS NEXT. The company is apparently claiming that the new platform “entirely” ditches the “AOSP codebase” in favor of a “fully independent architecture.” The result is a claimed 30% improvement in performance with a 20% drop in power consumption. It also features “Harmony Intelligence,” Huawei’s take on AI features which includes image generation, “sound repair,” image-to-audio descriptions for visually impaired users, and the ability for third-party apps to leverage AI for some tasks, such as translation.

A big focus for Huawei is apparently the ability for apps on NEXT to span multiple screen sizes.

Apparently, though, HarmonyOS NEXT still isn’t quite ready for primetime. The update is still undergoing development, but is available now for a limited number of beta testers in China. The formal release is apparently scheduled for Q4 2024.