Huawei HarmonyOS 2.0 beta released for a select smartphones

Huawei has officially released the HarmonyOS, its homegrown operating system, for smartphones. The initial release was debuted on smart TV mid-last year but it was hinted that the operating system will soon reach out for Huawei smartphones. That “soon” has finally here.

The Chinese tech giant has released the HarmonyOS only to select Huawei smartphones. The list includes Huawei P40, P40 Pro, Mate 30, Mate 30 5G, Mate 30 Pro, and Mate 30 Pro 5G.

In addition to the above smartphones, the Huawei MatePad Pro (three models variants, Wi-Fi, LTE and 5G) is also eligible to get HarmonyOS.

The first beta version of HarmonyOS is limited to select devices as listed above. The operating system, however, should be available for more Huawei and Honor devices running EMUI 11 in future.

If you are interested and have an eligible Huawei smartphone, you can get he HarmonyOS 2.0 Beta after signing up through following these guidelines. If you are approved, you should expect a confirmation email, followed by the OTA (over the air) update pushed to your phone. The process can take a couple of days from signing up to approval, and then from approval to OTA update.

In the following short video of the hands-on demo with HarmonyOS 2.0 beta shows that the user interface is not that different from the existing EMUI experience. It’s quite expected as well.

It’s also worth noting that HarmonyOS can also run Android apps as fine as they run on an Android phone. In fact, according to Huawei claims, HarmonyOS should be much faster than the Android platform.

Huawei has announced a developer competition with the award money of CNY 1.5 million (or $230,000) in total for new apps HarmonyOS. The Chinese tech giant has also released all the developer tools including the IDE (interactive development environment) with a device emulator for testing.