The OpenHarmony Technical Conference in Florence on September 3, 2025, served as a pivotal gathering, showcasing a vibrant and rapidly expanding ecosystem for smart devices. Far more than just a series of technical talks, the event highlighted the strategic collaboration between OpenAtom OpenHarmony and Eclipse Oniro, positioning Oniro as a bridge connecting the robust OpenHarmony foundation with a global developer community. The conference covered several key areas that enable cooperation and increase the number of opportunities for the whole ecosystem.
Oniro as the Global Gateway for OpenHarmony
The conference underscored Oniro's role in expanding OpenHarmony's global reach:
🌎 Addressing Accessibility Barriers: As highlighted by Francesco Pham (Huawei and Eclipse Oniro PMC lead), Oniro actively tackles common barriers to international adoption, such as unfamiliarity with Gitee, language differences, and the need for globally familiar tooling. His presentation "Accelerating Global OpenHarmony Adoption through Oniro Tooling, Devices & Infrastructure" positioned Oniro as the crucial connector.
🛠️ Empowering Developers with Familiar Tooling: Oniro delivers a developer-friendly VS Code extension that streamlines the build, sign, deploy, run, and debug workflow, supporting both app and system developers. This lightweight IDE experience lowers friction and accelerates iteration cycles.
📱 Broad Device and Emulator Support: Oniro ensures widespread accessibility by supporting OpenHarmony on various hardware and emulators. This includes a QEMU-based emulator for rapid prototyping (supporting x86_64) and expanded support for popular physical hardware like Raspberry Pi 4, along with community-ported mobile devices such as the OnePlus 6T and Volla X23.
🌐 Robust Global Infrastructure: Critical infrastructure, including GitHub mirrors, robust CI/CD pipelines, and English-first documentation, ensures seamless contribution workflows and accessibility for developers worldwide. This embodies the "Think Global, Code Local" philosophy, allowing developers to work in their preferred environments while contributing to a globally relevant platform.
Empowering Developers with Modern Frameworks and Languages
A significant focus was placed on making OpenHarmony accessible and powerful for a diverse developer base through support for popular programming paradigms:
⚛️ React Native on OpenHarmony/Oniro: Przemysław Sosna (Software Mansion) gave a deep dive into the integration of React Native. He demonstrated how this brings a massive community and cost-effective cross-platform development capabilities to OpenHarmony & Oniro, leveraging its imperative C-API for performance. His session acknowledged ongoing challenges like community awareness and keeping up with framework release schedules, but emphasised the commitment to this vital integration.
🎨 Qt Compact Painter for Hardware-Accelerated UIs: Kaj Grönholm (Qt Group) introduced QCPainter, a new work-in-progress hardware-accelerated painting API for Qt applications on HarmonyOS. Built on QRhi for native rendering across multiple graphics APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D), QCPainter offers a compact API similar to HTML Canvas Context2D. This emphasises performance and intuitive UI development, offering a powerful tool for creating modern, dynamic UIs.
✍️ Bringing Kotlin Multiplatform to OpenHarmony: Jasper Morgan (Snapp Mobile) explored the team's pioneering efforts in integrating Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) with OpenHarmony. This enables developers to leverage existing KMP investments to bring shared codebases (business logic, data models) to OpenHarmony, reducing development effort and accelerating multi-platform application development. Discussions with JetBrains for official OpenHarmony KMP target support are already underway.
🔒 Tauri for Secure Hybrid Apps: Daniel Thompson (Tauri Apps) highlighted Tauri 2.0, a framework for building secure, tiny, hybrid GUI applications with a Rust core. Tauri's strong focus on "secure by design" principles, including a hardened JavaScript API, compile-time IPC exposure configuration, and robust permission management, positions it as an inherently secure choice for OpenHarmony & Oniro. Its efficient resource usage and tiny binaries make it highly attractive for performance-critical smart devices.
Compliance as a Core Strength and Opportunity
A central theme of the conference was the proactive approach to regulatory compliance and open source integrity:
⚖️ Adapting open collaboration to regulation - the role of the CRA in the Oniro and Open Harmony cooperation: Juan Rico (Eclipse Foundation) presented how the cooperation between OpenHarmony and Oniro has created a rich solid consolidated ecosystem, and how this relationship enable the global community to address challenges like emerging regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). It was also presented how the Open Regulatory Compliance working group is helping to shape CRA compliance in open source.
🤝 Oniro Compliance Toolchain and OpenHarmony Compliance Toolchain: How Collaboration Creates Value Both Ways: Alberto Pianon (Array) and Luca Miotto (NOI Techpark) detailed the Oniro Compliance Toolchain. This sophisticated system, which utilises tools like Fossology and ScanCode, directly addresses the complexities of open source license identification and management in large projects like OpenHarmony/Oniro. It ensures adherence to the OpenChain ISO 5230 standard, providing a foundational layer of trust and transparency.
Practical AI Integration and Expanding Use Cases
The conference also showcased concrete applications and advanced integrations for the ecosystem:
🧠 YanLink's OpenHarmony/Oniro & AI Technology Solution: A Practical Implementation: Dr. Liu Yang (YanLink.AI) presented YanLink's practical implementations of OpenHarmony/Oniro and AI technology. He detailed their modular multi-kernel YanLink OS, integrating on-device AI engines (like TFLite Micro for mini systems) and cloud AI solutions. YanLink is developing AI solutions for Industrial IoT (IIoT), smart edge terminals, and even new smart feature phones powered by Oniro, demonstrating the ecosystem's versatility and intelligence. This includes features like "Short-Range AI Connection" (SR-AIConn) and intelligent body management apps.
🤖 Jolla AppSupport - Android Apps on Linux without overhead: Marko Saukko (Jolla Mobile Ltd) presented Jolla AppSupport, a production-proven Android runtime container for Linux. This solution allows unmodified Android apps to run on OpenHarmony-compatible Linux devices with significantly less RAM (35% less) and faster startup (40% faster) than a full Android image. It achieves seamless UX integration and robust security, providing a powerful way to access the vast Android app ecosystem while maintaining a native Linux experience.
The event confirmed that the cooperation between Oniro and OpenHarmony represents a powerful opportunity to advance an open, sustainable, and interoperable ecosystem for intelligent devices. The discussions and exchanges we have shared highlight how collaboration enables us to accelerate innovation, reduce duplication, and strengthen the global adoption of open source solutions for smart devices. Most importantly, the event has shown the value of coming together: by creating spaces where developers, manufacturers, and stakeholders can meet, learn, and work side by side, we build the trust and momentum needed to ensure collective progress and long-term impact for the entire ecosystem.
Joining the Oniro Working Group enables organisations to directly influence the technical direction and development of this pivotal open source operating system kit. Reach out to us through this form or at any of the events Oniro will be participating in.
