Appliance Giant Midea Deepens Cooperation With Huawei, Reveals OpenHarmony 2.0-Based IoT System
Chinese household appliance manufacturer Midea Group held the 2021 Midea Intelligence Conference last Thursday, at which the firm unveiled its OpenHarmony 2.0-based Internet of Things (IoT) system, launched in cooperation with OpenAtom Foundation.
Midea’s new IoT system, an open source software foundation, is cross-platform, distributed and open, according to the company. The system is planned to offer a plug-and-play unified platform without having to develop a separate app for each smart home appliance.
In fact, Midea commented in June this year on a domestic investor platform that the company had reached an initial cooperation intention with Huawei in March 2020. As of May, 2021, 74 Midea products equipped with the Huawei HarmonyOS system across 17 categories have entered the market. According to the company’s plan, Midea will release nearly 200 HarmonyOS products in 2021.
Zhang Xiaoyi, Vice President of Midea Group, said the shipment of Midea products equipped with HarmonyOS is expected to exceed 2 million units this year.
The firm added that users can distribute Midea’s home appliances through mobile phones equipped with HarmonyOS, taking three seconds at the fastest. The previously released COLMO EVOLUTION series air conditioners are also equipped with the HarmonyOS intelligent operating system.
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According to public information, OpenHarmony is an open source project hatched and operated by the OpenAtom Foundation. Its goal is to build an intelligent equipment operating system for all product scenarios, and promote the development of the industrial internet.
Chinese media outlet IThome reported that the project, operated by the OpenHarmony Project Group Working Committee, follows open source protocols such as Apache 2.0. Huawei donated the system’s underlying capabilities to the OpenAtom Foundation, and the open source distributed operating system was jointly built by seven units, including PATEO, Huawei, JD.com, Hoperun, Yigatong, Institute of Software, ISCAS (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Chinasoft International.
