What exactly is it? They're shipping Linux laptops now. Is this a Linux phone or does "break from Android" mean "It's using an Android fork like last year but this year they aren't mentioning Android in the press release"?
No, so far as I understand it it's a separate system that may not be compatible with android. HarmonyOS is intended to be a cross platform operating system from the ground up linking phone, car (electronic vehicles growing exponentially in China), desktop, household electronics, household AI, etc, completely seamlessly. If you aren't part of that entire ecosystem as Huawei visualize, which is likely the case if you're not in China, you probably won't experience the benefit of HarmonyOS, it'll just be another system running another set of apps. But ppl in China will if it rolls out as intended.
Outside of China, HarmonyOS will probably eventually need to be compatible with Android to be competitive.
And this is a third Harmony OS, separate from their Linux distro and Android version? Because both of those were called Harmony OS too and did iOS style inter-device communication.
K that's beyond my knowledge level to answer xD I mostly know what Huawei want it to become and how they likely can make it happen compared to Google Home and Apple versions of the same dream but badly realized, give the more friendly environment to Huawei in China, its relationship with more companies and branches of products, and ppl being more used to doing literally everything already via their mobile os and very willing to be even more immersed
in the the wikipedia article it seems to use multiple kernels (either a rtos type kernel for iot and wearable devices or the linux kernel + aosp layer for phones, tablets, etc...) seems that in the new next version they will no longer use the linux kernel but their own kernel instead and move away from android entirely (i got that last bit from this article)
My understanding is that it's an Android fork, and at this point it's diverged enough that it doesn't work with stock Android apps. Another break from Android is that Huawei has their own service ecosystem and app store that's independent of Google.
Not sure if they do or not, but they could just build two separate versions of the app against different services. So, if you're publishing to the Google store you use gservices and if you're publishing to Huawei store then you use Huawei ones. The API could be the same from app's perspective, so it'd just be a matter of which library you use to talk to the services.