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by ladyanita22 326 days ago
Having used HarmonyOS, it feels totally like Android. Even the back buttom behavior and the app lifecycle feels the same.

Some might argue that this is intentional, but to me, this more likely shows that HarmonyOS is just a hard fork of Android without sources released and, likely, with their own virtual machine implementation (ARK instead of ART).
2 comments
pjmlp 326 days ago
It is more than that, because it uses neither Java nor Kotlin, the main programming language is inspired in Typescript, ArkTS.
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kllrnohj 326 days ago
And yet https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/harmonyos-guide...

Looks shockingly similar to Android Studio including the exact same program layout on the filesystem and SDK compatibility selection.

ArkTS itself looks new enough, but if it turns out to just be something like Flutter, running on an otherwise Android OS, that doesn't look like it would be surprising

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pjmlp 326 days ago
Not surprising, all embeded IDEs used to look like Eclipse CDT, nowadays they all look like VSCode forks, at least they aren't shipping yet another Chrome Platform Runtime based IDE.

And Flutter was initially based in React before adopting Dart, while Compose was Android's team response to the internal turf wars at Google.

It is to be expected that when forced to not use Android any longer due to politics, they would make a platform that eases the effort of developers with Android skills to transition to a new platform free of US politics.

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kllrnohj 326 days ago
Harmony OS 1-4 were openly Android-based. It's Harmony OS 5 that supposedly is this new thing. Which did you use?
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ladyanita22 323 days ago
HarmonyOS Next (which I guess is 5). A chinese guy I met at the airport showed to me very proudly how amazing Chinese-made tech was. I will say the software looked polished enough and surprisingly good, yet it felt totally just like a hard android-based OS (which I bet it is).

Some might argue that the software has enough changes in it to be considered a distinct OS, but I'd rather just call it a hard fork as I had the impression that this was a more accurate depiction of what's really going on behind the scenes.

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