Openharmony App development tutorial (0) The First Glance

In this series of tutorial, I’d introduce how to develop Openharmony Apps. First of all, In this post, I’d introduce the story of Openharmony AKA Hongmeng in mandarin pinyin.

The first time I heard about HarmonyOS was the year 2019. As we all know the ban of the mobile chips. That accelerated the HarmonyOS coming to the front. At the beginning it had some features of Openharmony working with Android compatibly.

Here comes 2 concepts of Harmony Operating System. One is HarmonyOS on the phone. One is the opensource project Openharmony.

First let’s talk about HarmonyOS. It’s mostly known running on the phone. The anouncement of HarmonyOS was in a rush. Besides, no one will use a phone that has no software ecosystem. So HarmonyOS working with Android was a right strategy. For normal users, transfering smoothly from Android to HarmonyOS is always the best way. That’s why many people were discussing whether it’s a new OS or just another release of Android.

Then it comes to Openharmony. Openharmony is an opensource project hosted on https://gitee.com/openharmony. It’s built from ground up. At the very beginning, this project has limited features. So it could hardly has a release to normal users. Despite this, what’s more important is, it’s an opensource project. Although I’m not able to understand the source code, those who can understand will have their own judgement whether it’s a copy of Android. I can see Huawei is confident to show all of the codes. Openharmony is the core idea of the next generation of IOT operating system, including mobile phones.

During last 5 or more years. HarmonyOS and Openharmony both kept growing up. At Nov 2023 Huawei announced the HarmonyOS Next plan. HarmonyOS is running on the phone. The version 4.x and before are all compatible with Android. When it comes to HarmonyOS 5.x AKA HarmonyOS Next, HarmonyOS won’t be compatible with Android anymore. Also this release version is totally based on Openharmony project. Those 2 lines of Harmony Operating System meet each other.

The above is the general timeline of Harmony Operating System.

Openharmony is the next generation of IOT Operating System. It can be trimmed to a very small size, so it is able to run on IOT device that has very limited hardware resource. It’s officially seperated to 3 kind of devices considering the hardware resource. Mini devices with only 128KB memory like sensors and wearable devices are also supported. If resource is more sufficient, 1MB of memory like IP cameras or routers, those are defined as Small devices. If memory goes to 128MB, it’s called Standard device. For example, mobile phones.

The most new feature I’m interested in is its distrubuted soft bus. Devices can be easily share data with each other using distrubuted database. Apps can be transfered from one device to another. All the devices running Openharmony can be gathered together and cooperating easily.

Not only that, there are more features that trying to fix the issues current mobile OS is facing. Openharmony is going to let the developers be able to develop once and deploy to multiple types of devices easily. For the UI development it provides declarative programming which these years becomes more popular on mobile phones. It provides better permission management than iOS. It has AI module in system service level.

The future is coming. I searched for some forums and video websites. There are no English version of Openharmony Tutorial. Let me guide you to the Harmony world step by step.