The major upgrade of Pure Blood Hongmeng has been decided!
Source: Lei Technology AI Hardware Group | Editor: Winter Jam | Typography: JAY
Five years ago, Hongmeng was officially released at the Huawei HDC 2019 Developer Conference. Five years later, Huawei will open the most important chapter of Hongmeng at the HDC 2024 Developer Conference.
From June 21st to 23rd, Huawei plans to continue to hold the annual Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2024) in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, and will officially announce the developer beta plan of HarmonyOS NEXT (i.e. Hongmeng Galaxy Edition).
This is the most important thing.
But at this developer conference, it’s not just about this. Will HarmonyOS NEXT be officially launched under the name of HarmonyOS 5? Will the quantity and quality of Hongmeng’s native applications be improved? What kind of experience will the HarmonyOS NEXT system itself bring? What changes will Huawei’s Pangu model bring to us? These questions may be the focus of many people’s attention.
Although the developer conference lasts for three days, the most valuable event for most attendees is the keynote speech on the 21st.
According to the official information of the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2024), starting at 2:30 pm on the same day, Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei, chairperson of end point BG, and chairperson of smart car solutions BU, will first start the speech "Hongmeng Ecology: Fertile Soil for Innovation, Thick Planting of the Future".
Figure/Huawei
In theory, Yu Chengdong will summarize the progress of Hongmeng ecology in the past year or even longer, as well as the official announcement of the arrival of HarmonyOS NEXT. But the specific introduction may be left to the next Huawei end point BG CEO He Gang.
In other words, if you want to understand the HarmonyOS NEXT system itself, you should pay attention to He Gang’s speech "HarmonyOS NEXT – Building a New World of Hongmeng".And judging from the arrangement and content of the speech, we will not see HarmonyOS 5, but the brand-new HarmonyOS NEXT.
Regarding the subsequent naming, whether to continue the HarmonyOS X approach, there is also a question that remains to be answered.
But in addition to the pure self-developed Hongmeng kernel and no longer compatible with Android applications, there is not much reliable information flowing out of HarmonyOS NEXT. On the contrary, screenshots from the Internet show that the developer version of HarmonyOS NEXT in May has iterated to the first beta Beta 1 (3.0.0.22).This means that compared to the earliest Preview preview version, HarmonyOS NEXT has been basically perfected.
Of course, this is a developer beta, and the consumer-facing beta will have to wait another week. According to the information previously announced by Huawei, the beta plan of HarmonyOS NEXT will be launched at the developer conference, and the commercial version for consumers will be officially launched in the fourth quarter of this year.
Considering the release time of Huawei Mate series, it is basically certain that the official launch time of HarmonyOS NEXT will not be later than the IPO time of Huawei Mate 70 series, but there is also the possibility of advance.
Mate 60 series, picture/Huawei
This also brings up another question that many people are concerned about: what models can be upgraded HarmonyOS NEXT?
From Huawei’s perspective, the more models that can be upgraded to HarmonyOS NEXT, the better, which can not only convert the previous large number of HarmonyOS device users into HarmonyOS NEXT users, but also increase user stickiness; it can also expand the user equipment base of HarmonyOS NEXT, attracting more third-party app and equipment manufacturers.
However, there are various challenges in reality, and the cost of adaptation is secondary, but limited by the performance and configuration of the device, HarmonyOS NEXT can play its due ability and experience on some devices, including entry-level devices from many years ago.
Now we can’t be sure of the specific list of HarmonyOS NEXT upgrade plans, but in fact we can refer to the latest version of HarmonyOS support models.As the latest version of HarmonyOS for consumers, the push update of HarmonyOS 4.2 has basically started since the end of April, and the latest round of push updates has been covered by the Huawei Mate 40 series.
The specific upgrade list for HarmonyOS 4.2 is as follows:
Figure/Huawei
Overall, the HarmonyOS 4.2 upgrade plan still supports a large number of Kirin models released in 2019-2020, including 6 Honor models. However, there are also some models that were not included in the upgrade list, such as Huawei Mate 20 series and Huawei P30 series.
Back to HarmonyOS NEXT, the most core changes are mainly reflected in mobile phones and tablet devices. So it can be roughly judged,The mobile phone and tablet devices in the HarmonyOS 4.2 upgrade plan will basically be included in the HarmonyOS NEXT upgrade plan.
In addition to the Huawei Mate 70 series directly pre-installed with HarmonyOS NEXT, the Pura70 series and other models equipped with Kirin 9000 series chips should be among the first batch of upgrades.
Of course, the system is absolutely not enough, whether it is Android or iOS, the core needs of users are met by one application.
In June 2019, Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, said in an interview, "The technical difficulty of making an operating system is not big, but the ecological difficulty is big."
In fact, the developer conference is an important part of the ecosystem, and since 2019, every Huawei developer conference has been large in scale, with a large number of developers participating every year. But even so, this year’s Huawei developer conference will be special, not only the number of developers may be particularly large, but more importantly, the establishment of a true ecosystem.
According to the event arrangement, after the speeches of Yu Chengdong and He Gang, followed by the speech of Gong Ti, President of Huawei’s end point BG software department, "Hongmeng native application, a new start!", it is highly likely that the latest application coverage progress will be announced. Whether it will change the original 5,000 App plans is still unknown, but there is no doubt that:
2024 will be a crucial year for Hongmeng’s ecological development.
This change actually began to emerge last year. After the official announcement of the HarmonyOS NEXT plan at the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2023) last year, Huawei announced the full launch of Hongmeng native applications at the autumn full-scene new product launch conference soon after.
Figure/Huawei
After a series of official announcements, we soon saw a series of moves by Huawei and the reaction of the entire domestic Internet ecosystem.
Starting from Meituan, Huawei quickly swept through major Internet companies by jointly holding the "Hongmeng native application development launch ceremony". By January 2024, nearly half of the Top 200 mobile Internet applications had launched the development of Hongmeng native applications, including Meituan, Alipay, JD.com, B Station, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Autonavi, miHoYo, etc.
In some ways, this is just the end of the beginning.Then, Huawei expanded the number of applications joining the Hongmeng ecosystem to more than 4,000 in just three months at the beginning of 2024. The increase in speed is expected, after all, there are demonstrations from major manufacturers, a series of follow-up announcements, and the potential that Hongmeng has accumulated in the past few years. But even so, the number of more than 4,000 applications is still exaggerated, and may even exceed Huawei’s internal expectations.
Because according to Huawei’s goals,They plan to migrate 5,000 applications in 2024, meeting 99% of the time spent by most mobile phone users through 200 national-level applications and 4,800 mainstream applications, in order to achieve a seamless migration of users.
Although "start development" and "real landing" are two different concepts, according to the current speed of progress, the goal of 5,000 models is likely to be successfully completed. Even at this developer conference, I wouldn’t be surprised if Huawei announced that 5,000 apps have joined the Hongmeng ecosystem.
But anyway, this must be good news for users who are interested in choosing HarmonyOS NEXT and Huawei equipment, because it means users don’t have to give up anything. However, we still have some concerns.
Although there is a high probability that it will be adapted, so far, there is still no conclusive news that WeChat and Douyin have joined the Hongmeng ecosystem. And from the perspective of time and publicity, this developer conference may be the best stage and opportunity for the two official apps to join Hongmeng, which can allay the concerns of all third-party developers and users in one fell swoop.
At last year’s Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2023), Huawei released HarmonyOS 4 and a new small art based on the Pangu model.
More than half a year has passed, and now the trend of combining mobile phones with large models is becoming more and more obvious, including Apple also integrated Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.The re-upgrade of Xiaoyi goes without saying, and how HarmonyOS NEXT will combine with generative AI is probably also the focus of everyone’s attention.
Figure/Huawei
In fact, at the Huawei Analyst Conference in April, Huawei’s rotating chairperson Xu Zhijun specifically mentioned "building a’Xiaoyi ‘super agent based on the Pangu model." But first of all, the big model driven by the bottom is still one of the keys to the upgrade.
Unlike many large models that directly target C-end users, Huawei’s Pangu model has little reputation in the ordinary client base, but its actual influence in the industry is obvious to all. Not only that, long before OpenAI launched GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, Huawei saw the potential of pre-trained large models to solve AI application scenarios and develop fragmentation. It trained the Pangu model independently and continued to iterate.
At this year’s Huawei Developers Conference (HDC 2024), Huawei will also release Pangu Model 5.0, claiming to be "born for the industry."At the same time, Zhang Ping’an, executive director of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Cloud, will give a speech on "Pangu Model 5.0 Released, Continuing to Solve Problems for the Industry", and Yao Jun, director of Huawei Noah’s Ark Laboratory, will also give a speech on "Pangu Model 5.0 Decryption, Core Technology Innovation".
Figure/Huawei
It is foreseeable that the Pangu model 5.0 is reflected in HarmonyOS NEXT, and the core is still through "Xiaoyi".
As Xu Zhijun said, with the big model coming out, it has become more and more a reality to equip each end user with an intelligent assistant, and Huawei’s next expectation is to build "Xiaoyi" into a super assistant based on the Pangu big model, and make HarmonyOS Next a native intelligent operating system.
In terms of ideas and goals, this is nothing new, as countless people and companies have imagined the vision of an intelligent digital assistant in their hands, including after the emergence of ChatGPT. At the same time, from OPPO to Lenovo to Baidu, agents are also widely regarded as one of the core ways for large models to truly land and face users.
However, Huawei is indeed one of the most promising manufacturers to achieve a "super personal assistant", in part because of its leadership in the field of large models.On the other hand, Huawei can start designing from the bottom of HarmonyOS NEXT, "unifying the AI capability base to build system-level native intelligence."
And when Pangu Model 5.0 meets HarmonyOS NEXT, what kind of chemical reaction will it produce? Perhaps it will also be the most anticipated and unpredictable thing at this Huawei Developers Conference.
End
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