Understanding What HarmonyOS Adds to OpenHarmony
Many people wonder about the relationship between HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony. The simplest answer is that HarmonyOS is a distribution of OpenHarmony. A more detailed explanation would delve into their historical origins:
Huawei open-sourced the foundational capabilities of HarmonyOS and donated them to the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation, officially establishing the OpenHarmony open-source project. This laid the foundation for OpenHarmony's development and created a shared technical origin for both. Both are designed based on distributed technology, supporting seamless connectivity across devices and aiming to build a unified operating system platform to enable multi-device collaboration and provide users with a better experience.
OpenHarmony is a completely open-source project managed by the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation, targeting global developers and manufacturers. It can be applied to various IoT devices and more scenarios. In contrast, HarmonyOS is Huawei's commercial version. While some of its source code is open, it is primarily used for Huawei's own devices and ecosystem, with a focus on consumer-grade smart devices. OpenHarmony emphasizes providing foundational functionalities and frameworks for system development, offering underlying support for the development of different hardware devices and applications. HarmonyOS, on the other hand, builds upon OpenHarmony by further integrating Huawei's unique services.
This article will explore the specific services Huawei has integrated into HarmonyOS based on OpenHarmony, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities HarmonyOS has added to OpenHarmony.
OpenHarmony Architecture Overview
The official technical architecture diagram of OpenHarmony is as follows:
It consists of four layers: the Kernel Layer, System Services Layer, Framework Layer, and Application Layer.
Kernel Layer
In addition to the KAL (Kernel Abstraction Layer), the Kernel Layer includes the Driver Subsystem and HDF (Hardware Driver Foundation). HDF can be understood as analogous to Android's HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). Different hardware vendors implement their own hardware drivers while maintaining consistent upper-layer interfaces. Since HarmonyOS runs on Huawei hardware, this layer is undoubtedly proprietary to Huawei.
Framework Layer and System Services Layer
HarmonyOS also provides its own capabilities in the Framework Layer and System Services Layer, such as AI capabilities. The Framework Layer offers application development frameworks for multiple languages, including C/C++, JS, and the ArkUI framework for JS-based applications, as well as multi-language framework APIs for various software and hardware services. Depending on the degree of system component modularization, this aspect remains consistent between HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony.
Application Layer
HarmonyOS provides numerous system applications on the Application Layer, such as the AppGallery, which offers an app store and more.
In terms of overall design philosophy, both are highly aligned, emphasizing:
- Hardware Mutual Assistance and Resource Sharing
- Develop Once, Deploy Across Multiple Devices
- Unified OS with Elastic Deployment
Moreover, Huawei has publicly committed to ensuring interoperability between OpenHarmony and HarmonyOS.
Unique Capabilities of HarmonyOS
Next, we will delve into the specific capabilities HarmonyOS offers on top of OpenHarmony.
The simplest way to understand this is by examining the official application services provided by HarmonyOS:
These are Huawei's "unique" services, connecting to Huawei's servers and leveraging Huawei's capabilities. They include:
- Huawei Account Service
- Advertising Service
- Calendar Service
- Calling Service
- Cloud Development Service
- Contacts Service
- Gaming Service
- Health & Fitness Service
- In-App Payment Service
- Live Window Service
- Location Service
- Map Service
- User Notification Service
- Huawei Payment Service
- PDF Service
- File Preview Service
- Push Notification Service
- Integrated Scenario Service
- Sharing Service
- App Market Service
- Wallet Service
- Weather Service
These services provide users with a richer and more convenient experience by utilizing capabilities offered by Huawei's servers. These are functionalities that OpenHarmony does not possess and cannot offer. If another mobile phone manufacturer were to develop a phone based on OpenHarmony, these services would need to be developed from scratch.
AI Capabilities Exclusive to HarmonyOS
Beyond these services, AI capabilities are also unique to HarmonyOS:
Take the Intent Framework as an example. The Intents Kit (Intent Framework Service) is a HarmonyOS-level intent standard system that connects business functionalities within applications/meta-services.
The Intent Framework helps developers intelligently distribute business functionalities within applications/meta-services to various system entry points, a process known as intelligent distribution. These system entry points include:
- Xiaoyi (Huawei's AI assistant) Conversation
- Xiaoyi Search
- Xiaoyi Suggestions
The relationship between system entry points, the Intent Framework, and the HarmonyOS ecosystem is illustrated below:
By leveraging HarmonyOS's large models and multi-dimensional device perception AI capabilities, the framework accurately and promptly captures users' explicit and potential intentions, enabling personalized, multimodal, and precise intelligent distribution. The intelligent distribution offers various feature categories, with habits recommendation, event recommendation, skill invocation (voice), and local search currently available, and more categories to be introduced in the future.
In the interaction between HarmonyOS and applications/meta-services, intent operations are divided into intent invocation and intent sharing:
As shown in the diagram, these capabilities ultimately rely on Huawei's cloud services, making them unique to HarmonyOS.
By now, when someone asks about the differences between HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony, you should be able to enumerate several specific unique capabilities that HarmonyOS offers.
Summary
This article has introduced the application services and AI services provided by HarmonyOS on top of OpenHarmony, as well as an overview of the OpenHarmony architecture.
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