Huawei turned its attention to the IoT opportunity as a way to bolster its HarmonyOS play, by targeting what it said were gaps in current device connectivity.

In a briefing, Wang Chenglu, president of the software unit at Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, said the company believed current approaches lack coherency, with this lack of seamless user experience hindering IoT uptake.

Huawei is working to ensure “the mutual connectivity, communication and integration of IoT devices in a convenient way”, he explained. It introduced a feature named Distributed Technology to its Android-based EMUI 10.1 interface to allow different devices to be combined.

Wang added the current smartphone industry had already established “a very rich ecosystem” and expressed hope developers could fully leverage it and use existing assets to cover more IoT devices with minimum cost.

As a target for HarmonyOS, Wang outlined providision of a set of software which can be flexibly deployed across multiple IoT modules instead of having different operating systems for different devices.

The company aimed to make HarmonyOS able to support a variety of devices and equipment, including car telematics systems, smartwatches, wristbands, earphones and robots.