Huawei's HarmonyOS Will No Longer Support Android Apps - Pandaily
Huawei's HarmonyOS system will no longer be compatible with Android applications. NetEase, Meituan, and other companies are urgently recruiting HarmonyOS developers.
Makes sense, Java sucks and native apps are much faster and use less resources.
Once they paid Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba to port their apps, basically 95% of the Chinese market is satisfied.
You only need WeChat, taobao, alipay, pinduoduo, Baidu and amap in China.
Because they don't need to worry about selling their device abroad, they have the luxury to not only give up to google apps, but to all the apps
iPhone users are also having similar limitations with all the apps in the app store blacklisted except a few dozens manually approved by govt, but Apple is still selling a lot of units, even if it's just a "WeChat mobile terminal" and not a real smartphone anymore
Java is not as bad as you're making it out to be. It's always funny to see people list the problems with Java as if they're obvious. They're trade offs.
With this change, you're right, they certainly won't have to worry about selling the device abroad.
the phones are already impossible to sell abroad without the google apps and a locked bootloader, it changes nothing for them
because they are in control of the platform they don't need to run everything in an interpreter. The cpu is and will always be arm-based, any interpreted language is a waste of power
Java definitely does not suck. There is a reason it runs virtually everywhere, from SIM cards to most servers of the world through Spring
interpreted languages are inherently slower than native code. Because huawei controls the hardware they don't need portability and can focus on speed
on a phone, using java will give all the disadvantages with no advantages
look at iphone vs android, for years apple had better battery life and better performance even with half the ram, a worse cpu and smaller batteries
Android has moved on from Java 7 for years, Android 14 is Java 17 now
https://developer.android.com/about/versions/14/behavior-changes-14
harmonyos is almost aosp where they did a "search and replace" for "android" strings
i understood "HarmonyOS NEXT" is different, if it's not rewritten from scratch then it's a waste of time+money, forcing devs to port apps for "it's almost the same but it's a bit different" it's not a smart idea
Also the native apps look like they are written on Java? Or based on JVM
if it's still based on a jvm then they're dumb and it's a decision that makes no sense
Get ready for even more "apps" that are just glorified web views of their mobel site.
that's a vast majority of apps already, oh i guess they add tracking also.