Huawei's HongMeng OS could soon break cover, feature on a smartphone before end of the year

China’s state-run Global Times is reporting that Huawei will officially unveil its in-house operating system known as HongMeng OS, or Oak OS for non-Chinese markets. The official reveal will come at Huawei’s developer conference slated for Friday this week. The operating system has been compared to Google’s currently in development Fuchsia OS in that it is scalable but has primarily been designed with IoT devices in mind.

Interest in HongMeng OS spiked following Huawei’s appearance on the US Entity List which bans US companies from trading with it unless given special permission to do so as it is considered a threat to US national security. At least temporarily banned from using Google’s Android operating system, speculation was rife that HongMeng OS could end up Huawei’s smartphones even though it was later revealed that was not its originally intended purpose. In fact, HongMeng OS will make its debut on Huawei’s Honor smart TVs in the first instance.

However, in keeping with its theme of being able to run across multiple platforms, Huawei is indeed said to be working on porting the OS to run on at least one smartphone planned for release before the year is out. Although the Google Android ban has since been lifted, it appears the company is still planning on hedging its bets and will release a smartphone with HongMeng OS onboard sometime in Q4, targeted a the low-to-midrange segment. This would suggest it isn’t ready for the bigtime but will be something the company looks to test for market acceptance and will probably be China-only to begin with.