OpenHarmony 4.0 Beta 1 Launched with new features

The open source version of Huawei HarmonyOS, OpenHarmony 4.0 Beta 1, is now launched for the open source software community. This release brings new features and improvements to this software.

According to the changelog, OpenHarmony 4.0 beta 1 standard system functionality continues to improve. ArkUI further enhances the capabilities and effects of component and application framework optimizations.

It also boosts extension capabilities and application packages support no-unzip installation and sharing between applications, Distributed Data Management adds a unified data management framework (UDMF) to further enhance audio/media/control playback capabilities media/camera.

OpenHarmony 4.0 beta 1 handles application corner marker management for event notification and supports more key management features for basic security features. ArkCompiler has updated relevant tool versions of the C++ tool chain and has more test frameworks and advanced tool features.

Worth mentioning, this new build of OpenHarmony also markets the beginning of the Level 10 API interface.

Although it has a very large changelog but below you can check out some of the changes ahead.

ArkUI

1. Provide the Extension component, used to embed the extended function of one application into another application.
2. It supports setting high-order spherical attributes, bottom edge pixel expansion, color blur, G2 rounded corners, shadows, and high-order gradient attributes. 5.
   The drawing component supports offset/crop/mask properties.
3. The component supports the default characteristic animation.
4. The component supports default drag-and-drop and supports disabling default drag-and-drop.
5. The custom list pane supports customizing the color of the mask and pop-up animation.
6. bindContextMenu/bindMenu supports custom paths.
7. The ColumnSplit divider supports dragging. The Refresh component supports custom dropdown refresh functionality.
8. It supports the ability to measure the width and height of strings.

App structure

• Minimize extension feature management, support various extensions to open APIs according to business scenarios, and prevent sensitive API calls.
• Supports temporary authorization of data or file URIs.
• Provide a UIExtension mechanism, by which an application can embed its application into another application for display.
• Provide atomic service and card sharing interface, support atomic service data sharing and retrieval.

App package management

• It supports the function of installing the application package without unpacking, which optimizes the system startup performance and the application installation performance.
• It supports sharing packages between applications. Some systems are supported to provide the code functionality of their applications to 3rd party green applications and 3rd party applications should not be integrated into their own installation packages
• Relevant content (including code, resources and .so files, etc.), so as to reduce the integration cost and upgrade cost of green applications.
• It supports the installation of business applications. Verify corporate application installation permissions to prevent corporate applications from being distributed and installed at will; provide enterprise application certificate information queries to facilitate application market management and enterprise application revocation.

Distributed data management

1. The system application supports silent access to DataShareExtension data by other system applications via the Data Management Service Agent, i.e. the data of the DataShareExtension application can be accessed
   without starting the application where DataShareExtension is located.
2. The System Application supports accessing DataShareExtension single-mode application data through the Data Management Service Agent.
3. The DataShare client provides the ability to subscribe to DataShareExtension data changes based on the URI prefix, and any DataShareExtension data under the subscribed URI prefix occurs for changes to be notified to the DataShare client.
4. Added a unified data management framework (UDMF), which supports data standardization model, dragging data to device, UDMF data storage
   adaptation, entitlement management and lifecycle management.

File management

• The files are presented in a classified view and the media files do not have to pay attention to the specific storage location.
• Provide the ability to allow applications that need to manage or use media files, such as gallery, to manage media files in the form of albums, and provide the function of adding and removing media files in the album.
• Enhance the capability of file backup and restore framework, clone applications or DEMO applications can call ArkTS API to achieve backup and restore functions.
• Improve FilelO access ability, support listFile, scanFile, move.copy, filelock.watcher features.
• Provide URI-based file access and deauthorization capabilities, support URI-based unified file open capabilities, and facilitate applications to access required files flexibly and securely.

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