EMUI 11.1 will succeed EMUI 11 as early as March 2021, but it will be the last version of EMUI before Huawei switches to HarmonyOS
Huawei may be deep into rolling out EMUI 11, but the company is alleged to be lining up a new OS update. It remains unclear when the company will adopt Android 11, but multiple sources claim that Huawei will soon pivot to EMUI 11.1. Huawei has released x.1 OS updates multiple times, including EMUI 9.1 and EMUI 10.1, so the release of EMUI 11.1 seemed pretty nailed on, already.
According to Chang'an Digital Jun, a Chinese leaker, EMUI 11.1 will to arrive as early as March 2021, although this would clash with the rollout of EMUI 11. The website adds that EMUI 11.1 may debut on the P50 series, explaining the supposed March release date. Moreover, EMUI 11.1 is expected to run on Huawei's HarmonyOS kernel by default.
However, EMUI 11.1 will be the last version of EMUI that Huawei releases, which the company will subsequently replace with HarmonyOS. A developer version of HarmonyOS 2.0 suggests that it will resemble the UI and UX of EMUI 11 though, so people may struggle to tell the two OSes apart. HarmonyOS 2.0 will continue to support Android apps through Huawei's AppGallery, too. Huawei announced at HDC 2020 that HarmonyOS would not support devices with 4 GB of RAM or more until late 2021, so it may be 2022 before we see Huawei adopting HarmonyOS en masse.
Source(s)
Chang'an Digital Jun via Huawei Central (1) (2)
