5 million devices upgraded to Huawei’s HarmonyOS 7 in 24 hours

More than 5 million devices upgraded to HarmonyOS 7 within 24 hours of its release. Huawei posted the figure on its official Weibo account on 8 September, a day after it launched the operating system alongside the Mate XT 2 at an event in China.

Huawei’s Chinese post says “终端设备”, which means terminal devices, and gives a cumulative count of upgrades. It does not say users. One person with a Mate 80, a MatePad and a Watch Ultimate could account for three of the 5 million. Huawei has not broken the number down by product type, and it has not said how many of the upgrades were phones.

What the 5 million devices are

HarmonyOS 7 is the newest version of the operating system Huawei built to replace Android on its Chinese devices. Huawei announced it on 12 June at its developer conference, ran a developer beta over the summer, and opened a public beta on 7 September, the same day it launched the Mate XT 2 tri-fold.

The public beta covers five product types.

The first wave is:

• the Mate 80, Mate 70,
• Pura 90, Pura 80,
• nova 16, nova 15
• Enjoy 90 phone series,
• the Mate X7, Mate X6
• Mate XTs foldables,
• the MatePad Pro Max tablets
• the MateBook Pro laptop.
• the Watch Ultimate 2 and Watch Ultimate Design smartwatches and
• the FreeClip 2 earbuds.

More products are still being adapted, including routers and smart locks.

A second group follows in October:

• the Mate 60 series,
• the original Mate XT,
• the Pura 70 series,
• the nova 14, nova 13 and nova 12 series, the nova Flip,
• five MatePad lines, t
• the Watch GT 6 series, the Watch GT Runner 2 and
• the FreeBuds Pro 5, Pro 4 and FreeBuds 6.

There is no date yet for a stable release on existing devices. Huawei has told owners to wait for further announcements.

Owners of eligible devices in China get the update through Settings and Software Update, or by applying through the My Huawei app. Huawei describes both waves as beta software.

What is new in HarmonyOS 7

Huawei’s pitch for version 7 is Xiaoyi, its voice assistant, rebuilt as what it calls a system-level agent. Xiaoyi can call on more than 2,100 system capabilities and more than 500 ecosystem skills, so a single spoken instruction can chain together actions across apps. It also reads more than 200 categories of system data and works with more than 2,000 Harmony agents.

The rest of the update is a 3D visual redesign Huawei calls spatial aesthetics, a security layer named Star Shield, and a performance claim of 15% over HarmonyOS 6.1 that Huawei first made in June. We have not tested any of it.

How 5 million compares

HarmonyOS 6 and 7 together run on more than 85 million devices, a figure Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business, gave on stage on 7 September. That is up from 80 million on HarmonyOS 6 as of 20 August, and Huawei expects to pass 100 million in the fourth quarter. So the 5 million upgrades in the first day are about 6% of the installed base. Every one of them is a device that already ran an earlier HarmonyOS version, since the beta is only open to existing Huawei hardware.

The base is large because HarmonyOS has become the second-biggest phone operating system in China. As we reported on 30 August, Counterpoint Research put it at 24% of Chinese smartphone sales in the second quarter of 2026, ahead of iOS, and at 5% of sales worldwide.

The Kenya question

No Huawei phone in Kenya is eligible, because no Huawei phone sold outside China runs HarmonyOS. Huawei’s international phones, including the Pura 90s Pro Max and the nova 16s that launched in Munich last week, ship with EMUI 16, which is built on Android 16’s open source code. HarmonyOS 7 is not an update those phones can receive. Huawei has also not sold smartphones officially in Kenya for some time.

The Watch GT 6, which Huawei does sell in Kenya and which launched here in November from KES 33,999, runs HarmonyOS. Global GT 6 watches received HarmonyOS 6.1 in July, and the GT 6 series is on Huawei’s October beta list in China. Huawei has not said whether or when the watch’s HarmonyOS 7 update reaches the global version. We expect it though.

Huawei’s rotating chairman Xu Zhijun said at the company’s ecosystem conference on 28 and 29 August that Huawei would soon run HarmonyOS pilots in selected countries and regions. He did not name the countries or give a date.