To be fair, it is not quite there yet. It has "officially started public beta testing" of the OS for some of its smartphones and tablets that run its own Kirin and Kunpeng chips but unlike previous iterations of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps.

Huawei does not believe that the lack of Android support will bother its customers as China's top shopping, payment, and social media apps Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com as among those who have developed native apps for the OS.

Huawei also claimed that at the time of its announcement, over 15,000 HarmonyOS native applications and meta-services were also launched. This is a significant start, although Google and Apple still have bragging rights over the size of their app stores.

It said that the new OS has 110 million lines of code and claimed it improves the overall performance of mobile devices running it by 30 per cent. It also increases battery life by 56 minutes and leaves an average of 1.5GB of memory for purposes other than running the OS. It will also run on tablets and phones.

Apparently the company has no plans to offer Harmony OS NEXT outside of China so westerners will be stuck with Apple and Google’s duopoly.

Huawei hopes to bring its OS to PCs. Last month the chair of the Chinese giant's consumer business group, Yu Chengdong, revealed it would no longer run Windows on its future machines, but Harmony OS instead.