[ALLTaken]

Sounds very much like HarmonyOS. I was just in a Huawei Store and I think from a UI/UX perspective, despite being quite new, it's incredibly slick and leaps ahead in great design and integration within the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Even saw it being used as Laptop OS and Mobile, the convergence is quite applaudable.

The kindest was that the store's staff advised against buying the device as it's quite painful to use it with Google's apk & blobs, because it drains more battery than when it's integrated with your system services directly. I told him, that maybe rare, but I'm actually happy to not use Google apps as much as possible and especially not within my operating system. Another point he made was that 5G'A is blocked by Google, about that I know nothing to be honest.

Some Android forks are indeed quite nice, but the issue has always been the updating model, upstream maintenance and compatibility. With Harmony OS a large cooperation with the consumers in focus and the one developing the entire hardware stack is behind the OS development and maintenance making it safer against supply-chain hacks and a deeper integration possible than any other OS.

[pjmlp]

The next version of it, HarmonyOS NEXT is microkernel based, and they have two new languages of their own.

ArkTS, inspired in Typescript and similar nodejs runtime.

Naturally due to performance problems, they decided to come up with another one, also Typescript inspired, but ahead of time compiled, GC and effects.

It is called Canjgie.

This naturally is a big effort rebooting the whole ecosystem, it only works because Huawei could focus on the Chinese market after losing Android.

[zb3]

Ok, but that HarmonyOS NEXT is closed source and Huawei devices don't allow system modifications, right?

There's "OpenHarmony", but the question is whether we can practically run it on Huawei devices..

[pjmlp]

Most likely, but that wasn't the point I was answering to.

Open Harmony apparently is Huawei trying their own version of something like AOSP.

Most of the documents seem to only exist in chinese.

[kvuj]

If you're gonna leave the big two, why would you go for a closed source system where they can (and do) commit the same crime against user freedom?

[comandillos]

My daily driver is a HarmonyOS NEXT device these days.

I had to find a bunch of workarounds to have payments working (I ended vibe-coding my payments app in ArkTS, don't ask) and messaging apps, and well, I use it with almost 0 compromises on a daily basis. It feels like a breeze of fresh air to know there are other devices and platforms out there that, even if seen as the bad guys here in the western world, can be used as a way to escape the established monopolies.

Maybe I should go for Graphene as a safer option to free myself from GMS and Google/Apple in general, but that would require me buying a Pixel device from Google... which I don't like to be honest.