From IoT to Mobile: Oniro’s Technical Journey Toward Digital Independence

Digital sovereignty requires more than political declarations—it demands technical infrastructure that spans the entire device ecosystem. This presentation explores Oniro, an Eclipse Foundation project building on OpenHarmony’s foundation to create a unified, privacy-respecting platform spanning IoT devices to smartphones. We’ll examine the technical challenges of achieving true cross-device interoperability, including hardware abstraction layers that enable portability across diverse chipsets, compatibility solutions for proprietary mobile drivers, and distributed capabilities that enable seamless device collaboration. Through practical examples from our mobile porting efforts and embedded device implementations, we demonstrate how open-source alternatives can challenge existing mobile duopolies while maintaining European privacy standards and fostering genuine digital independence through unified cross-device architectures.