On the first day of the HUAWEI DEVELOPER CONFERENCE 2020, we saw the biggest announcements take place in their first initial keynotes. The HDC.Together event began on 9/10 and will continue through 9/12. Each keynote is being streamed online, making this event accessible to anyone who wants to join. If you missed the opening keynotes, you can watch the full replays below. You can start with this short recap that Huawei posted to twitter.
Yu Chengdong (Richard Yu)
In the first event, Richard Yu recaps the company’s recent successes and highlights its current areas of focus. In this talk, they introduce us to HMS Core 5.0. This update to the developer tools brings us new kits like camera kit, share kit, cast+ kit, and wireless kit. These new kits promise to make communications and transmission more accessible than ever.
HMS now has a developer community of 1.8 million people, and 96,000 apps have now integrated HMS core globally. AppGallery has reached 261 billion app downloads within H1 2020. As the HMS and AppGallery services continue to see massive growth, Huawei offers extensive support for overseas developers who want to reach a Chinese audience.
Staying on the topic of HMS, Huawei talked about their Cyberverse project, which uses Huawei AR map. This project includes 3d map processing tools, immersive rendering capabilities, spatial calculation capabilities, and 3D scenario editing tools. The ultimate goal is to create a competitor to Google Maps and Bing Maps.
Huawei HiCar was announced as a solution that will provide a smarter way to travel. HiCar will be an alternative to Apple Carplay and Android Auto. Huawei is already partnered with 20+ automakers and has support for 30+ apps.
We hope that one day, every car on the street can enjoy the experience of HiCar.
Richard Yu went on to make one of the biggest announcements of the conference which is HarmonyOS 2.0. This operating system is designed to be a cross-platform solution for both mobile devices and computers. Huawei showed us many different situations where HarmonyOS will exceed, like watch-based navigation. The adaptive UX framework means developers only need to develop their app once, and it will automatically adapt to every type of device.
A lot of time was spent going over some of the new features that you can expect to find in HarmonyOS 2.0. This is looking to be a powerful and exciting new addition to mobile operating systems, and it will be interesting to see how this new platform evolves. To find out more about HarmonyOS 2.0, go to developer.harmonyos.com
The next big announcement was EMUI 11. EMUI is Huawei’s version of Android that is made for Huawei and Honor smartphones and tablets. This next update is based on Android 11.
Lots of effort was put into new UI animations. Huawei used eye-tracking technology to study how humans interact with EMUI, and altered their design so that it requires as few eye movements as possible. This is the key behind all of the new animations in EMUI 11
EMUI 11 has a strong focus on multi-screen collaboration. Split-screen has been a feature on EMUI for a long time, but a phone’s screen is small and limited. EMUI 11 can now utilize a PC to display additional screens from your smartphone. A demo was shown in which a graphic could be seamlessly dragged from a PC display onto a tablet display. This behaved the same way it would if you dragged an application window across two monitors connected to the same PC. This new feature looks like it will be very interesting to test out, once EMUI 11 becomes available on more devices.
AI subtitles will be another important feature in this update. The ability to subtitle videos in real-time is an important accessibility feature that we have seen show up in recent Android updates. However, if you can translate your subtitles as well, it opens up more opportunities. The new AI subtitles have the ability to translate from English, Japanese, and Korean into Chinese.
For more of an in-depth look at EMUI 11, see our article:
EMUI 11 Hands-on: Huawei’s latest Android update makes multitasking easier
These were all of the biggest announcements that we saw from HDC.Together 2020. You can continue to watch the event unfold live, on the event page here.