"Hongmeng spent ten years on the Long March to complete a road that took European and American countries thirty years to complete."
This sentence first came from Huawei’s consumer business CEO and terminal BG chairman Yu Chengdong’s emotion on the stage during Huawei’s HDC in June this year. On the evening of October 22 during the “Hongmeng Night”, Yu Chengdong repeated this paragraph in his speech. "Golden sentence".
Huawei likes to use the term "Long March" to describe the difficulty of developing the Hongmeng system. In fact, it is completely cut off from the existing Android ecosystem and the difficulty of building an operating system ecosystem from scratch is indeed as high as the sky. However, Huawei is still relatively stable. The pace is driving HarmonyOS NEXT to continue to move forward.
On the evening of October 22, Huawei announced the official release of native HarmonyOS and announced a list of public beta devices. This means that HarmonyOS Next, which has been "released" for nearly a year, is finally ready for ordinary users.
According to Yu Chengdong’s previous statement, the first batch of Huawei mobile phones equipped with “native” HarmonyOS NEXT will be unveiled soon .
As Huawei's terminal operating system for the next era, Yu Chengdong emphasized its "cornerstone" positioning many times during the press conference: HarmonyOS NEXT has caught up with the initial wave of AI large-model capabilities sweeping smartphones since its initial announcement in 2023; however, If you want to truly gain an advantage in the competition in the next ten years, how to open AI capabilities to more developers is the question that HarmonyOS NEXT needs to answer the most right now.
01
What HarmonyOS5 is capable of
Standing today, when we talk about "what the operating system will look like in the next ten years", on-device AI is an unavoidable topic: on-device large model capabilities can not only solve the problem of high calling costs of cloud models, but also further empower It can support the third-party application ecosystem, allowing AI capabilities to further take root in more user application scenarios.
"Huawei alone cannot make Hongmeng a reality," Yu Chengdong said at the press conference.
From the perspective of "building a smartphone in the AIGC era", this sentence can be interpreted as "the best tools that can truly apply on-device AI capabilities are among them. I hope that third-party developers can use these tools to make good use of smart phones on Hongmeng devices." body".
Applications based on native development can not only directly interact deeply with the functions and hardware of the operating system, but usually perform best in terms of performance, user experience and platform integration. This is reflected in the integration of AI capabilities and hardware, which is crucial: now all first-tier mobile phone brands are emphasizing the concept of "AI intelligence" and adding AI capability support to various systems' built-in applications.
The night of the press conference: HarmonyOS NEXT also demonstrated many usage scenarios of "making mobile phone operations more intelligent through AI": for example, Xiaoyi, an intelligent assistant that integrates large model capabilities, has evolved from the original voice interactive assistant to nearly two Multimodal large models that became more popular in 2016. Combined with the content on the screen, the scene and conversation context of the current user are identified, and the user's intention is identified on the terminal side.
According to the introduction of He Gang, CEO of Huawei Terminal BG: Xiaoyi in HarmonyOS 5 can achieve more intelligent interactions by taking screenshots and selecting relevant content. For example, if you want to ask what species of birds appear on the screen, according to The clothes that appear on the screen provide relevant outfit suggestions, or automatically help you save your personal passport information on the device and automatically fill in relevant content when you need to enter it.
HarmonyOS 5 is also the official name of HarmonyOS NEXT. The cross-device interaction capability open to more users has become the focus of the introduction of the new system: Now with the blessing of Huawei's native Harmony system, all terminals have truly realized the opening up of the system kernel, and the device seamless collaboration between them. You can understand it as terminals such as mobile phones, tablets, and TVs are no longer independent individuals, but more like displays in different scenarios, carrying the same system ecosystem.
For example, with the cross-device application continuation function, you can immediately switch to your tablet or TV to continue watching an article you haven’t finished reading on your phone, or a video you’re halfway through, and the process is smooth and natural. At the same time, the mobile phone can also be transformed into a universal remote control, making it easy to control the volume of the playback device, content selection, and even switching between devices in real time. Devices are no longer isolated individuals, but ecological partners that work closely together.
Secondly, close-range sharing on mobile phones has also become smarter: first is the cross-device interoperability function: for example, when taking notes on a Huawei tablet, you need to insert an artwork. Now you just need to pick up the phone and take a photo, and HarmonyOS 5 will It will be automatically embedded into the notes on the tablet without interrupting the workflow at all. You can use the AI cutout function on your phone to select an image and copy it directly to your tablet, where you can continue to use it.
In the past, each device was its own king, but now, under the native Hongmeng unified architecture system, it is truly possible to completely connect the kernels and systems of all terminals.
The cross-device application continuation function is a typical example - unfinished articles or videos on the mobile phone can be seamlessly switched to the tablet or TV to continue reading or watching, and the operation is completed in one go. At the same time, the mobile phone can also be transformed into a remote control to control volume, content playback, and even easily switch screen projection devices in real time.
Huawei Share has also taken on new vitality. Through Huawei Share, you can transfer files, pictures, and videos to multiple devices at the same time without adding friends or creating groups. Huawei Share also supports a new interaction method of "touch and touch". Just touch the two devices and you can quickly share the photos on your phone, the goodies in your shopping cart, or the funny videos you just watched on Bilibili. Even the homepage of a Xiaohongshu blogger or the exercise plan on Keep.
Since AI capabilities actually require a lot of user data to be more "intelligent", in the era of AI mobile phones, how to delineate the security boundaries of system-level AI has become particularly critical. At the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC) in June this year, Huawei launched its self-developed HarmonyOS NEXT Star Shield security architecture, which rebuilt the operating system's security system to ensure the purity and reliability of applications from the source.
The native Hongmeng system officially released this time re-emphasizes the bottom line of "ensuring that user data is always retained locally on the device and sensitive data is not uploaded to the cloud." At the same time, users can delete this data at any time.
In the mobile operating system ecosystem, users have long been troubled by unreasonable application permissions. HarmonyOS 5 takes privacy and security as the core and redefines the rules for applications to obtain data: by prohibiting the opening of 9 types of unreasonable permission requests, Reduce the risk of privacy leakage from the source.
To put it simply, in the past, applications often needed to access "all" the user's data, but now secure access only requires "selected" data. For example, if you just want to change a social media avatar, you are asked to grant permissions to all photo albums; to take a photo, you have to open all functions of the camera;
HarmonyOS 5 rejects these unreasonable requests one by one, making application permissions more transparent. When sharing encrypted files, only authorized users can access them; applications that do not meet the security standards of the app store will not be able to be put on the shelves, installed and run. These newly upgraded security features help users achieve data transparency, making downloading and use more secure.
02
Build the “cornerstone” of the AI system
The war among mobile phone manufacturers has already transitioned from a pure hardware war to a system and ecological war.
Only manufacturers that are capable of in-depth customization from hardware, chips to operating systems can provide the most complete AI capability solutions in the ecosystem, as well as the most complete experience that comes with it. In this "next decade of operations" "Competition of the system" to gain the greatest chance of winning, this is destined to be a "long-distance race".
In order to support the final victory in this "long-distance race", Apple, also an industry giant, has made the largest internal team structure adjustment in more than ten years: In order to better coordinate resources, Apple has established a separate "pillar level" internally Cross-department projects incubate powerful AI that truly combines software and hardware.
This is also the reason why Apple continues to be favored by overseas industry practitioners despite being "late": it has a complete software and hardware development system and handy tools for developers, which are enough to support it in incubating products that are truly in line with the AI era and meet users' needs for smartphones. operating system.
In the future, starting from mobile phones and further expanding on-device AI capabilities to watches, cars, smart homes and other fields, a unified development ecosystem is indispensable.
Looking around the world, there are currently only two manufacturers that truly have a "whole industry chain" of hardware/chips, operating systems/ecology, Apple and Huawei.
While introducing the new system, Huawei also mentioned at the press conference the Pangu large model framework that supports device-side large model applications. This can be seen as an important step for Huawei to build a device-side AI ecosystem in the future: whether it is integrating device-side AI Whether capabilities are open to third-party application developers or whether to rely on client-side model capabilities to protect user privacy, both are inseparable from complete development resource support.
At the press conference on October 22, Huawei emphasized the concept of "native" for the first time: for ordinary users, this is actually not a concept that they were familiar with in the past. "Native" is more of a term commonly used by developers. : It stands for developing applications for a specific platform using that platform’s native programming languages, development tools, and frameworks.
In terms of the information conveyed in a literal sense, there is actually no difference between "native" and "pure blood", but for an operating system, "native" means full-link development core technology, with a mature set of automatic There is ecology.
At present, whether it is Alipay, DingTalk, Feishu, or WPS, these developers who take the stage to introduce Hongmeng applications focus on the end-side AI capabilities based on Hongmeng. These third-party applications combine the actual application scenarios of users and the calling end. Looking at the effects achieved by AI capabilities, the soul of the "next-generation operating system" may be hidden in it.
" The road is as strong as iron, but now we are leaping forward from the beginning." For Huawei, which has nurtured a new operating system from scratch, the current Huawei may indeed be the most confident manufacturer to shout this sentence.