HarmonyOS 2.0 will ship with Huawei Mate 40

HarmonyOS 2.0, the second generation update of Huawei’s built from the ground up, Android-agnostic mobile operating system, appears to have a clear update schedule. According to a post on Chinese social media platform Weibo, the HarmonyOS 2.0 rollout schedule includes a large number of Huawei and Honor smartphones, and some of them have significantly older processors.

The update schedule includes the beta of HarmonyOS 2.0 around December 2020, after which wider rollouts are reported to begin for the first batch of Huawei and Honor devices as early as January or February 2021 .

According to Weibo, the update schedule includes smartphones powered by the Kirin 9000 series chipset, including the Huawei Mate 40 series smartphones.

Thereafter, the second batch of rollouts will affect smartphones powered by the Kirin 990 5G chipset, including some of the Huawei P40 and Mate 30 line-ups. After that, Huawei will reportedly seek to roll out wider batches of updates to its smartphones, with the third batch will include smartphones running Kirin 990 (4G), Kirin 985 and Kirin 820. The fourth batch will include smartphones running Kirin 980. Finally, the fifth batch of planned HarmonyOS 2.0 updates will include smartphones running Kirin 810, and some smartphones running on Kirin 810. Kirin 710.

The move will mark Huawei’s formal departure from the Android ecosystem following the imposition of US sanctions. While Huawei has so far publicly stated that it will dispense with the support of Google’s vast Android ecosystem, the incident was a notable setback for Huawei. The trade war has reduced Huawei’s global presence.

While Huawei has released growth figures following the comparative normalization of the Covid-19 pandemic in mainland China, other OEMs have faced difficulties due to the socio-economic impact of the pandemic. As a result, when normal business resumes in the medium term, Huawei is expected to feel the crisis more strongly.