Huawei has announced the much-awaited HarmonyOS 2.0 at the annual developer’s conference in China. The HarmonyOS 2.0 will come on smartphones in 2021.

The HarmonyOS started as an operating system for smartwatches, IoT devices, and TVs. Now it has finally branched out to smartphones as well. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Huawei is banned from doing business with American entities and no more has access to Google services.

Huawei head Richard Yu said, “The beta version of HarmonyOS 2.0 will be available on September 10th for developers, but will be available for smart TVs, watches and head units.” He further added, “At the end of this year, the SDK tools and simulators of HarmonyOS 2.0 will be available to smartphones. Next year we will see smartphones running HarmonyOS 2.0.”

The fate of current Huawei users in the Western market is unclear. Meanwhile, the HarmonyOS 2.0 seems more of a China-exclusive at the moment. At the keynote, only Chinese developers were mentioned, and nothing was said about the global rollout of HarmonyOS 2.0. It is also worth noting that Huawei’s HarmonyOS 2.0 will borrow heavily from AOSP and offer features like fully adaptive user interface, voice recognition, and more. The HarmonyOS for the smartphone will be released alongside SDK and documentation for developers in December 2020.

Huawei is taking a slow and steady approach with HarmonyOS. In the first phase, the operating system will support Huawei devices with RAM capacity ranging from 128KB-128MB. The second phase extends to devices with 128MB-4GB of RAM. The final phase will support devices with more than 4GB RAM. In other words, the HarmonyOS priority will be budget devices with less than 4GB of RAM.