Honor has started its Android 17 rollout, 51 phones are on the list

Honor released MagicOS 11 at its Shenzhen developer conference on the evening of 15 September and seeded the finished version on 18 devices the same night. MagicOS 11 is Honor’s Android 17, the version Google released on 16 June. The plan Honor published covers 51 phones, 12 tablets and four watches in three batches to November.

Honor calls this first wave 正式版不限量尝鲜, unlimited early access to the official build. It is not a beta. Two things normally happen together when a phone gets a new Android version: the finished software is released, and an automatic update starts reaching people in batches. Honor has done the first without the second. The code is the final release, there is no limit on how many people can take it, and you fetch it yourself in the My Honor app rather than waiting for a notification.

So if you own a Magic8 Pro or a Magic7 in China, you can be on Android 17 today. If you would rather let the update come to you, that is a few weeks away.

The three batches

Out now:

1. Magic V6,
2. Magic V5,
3. Magic8 RSR Porsche Design, Magic8 Pro, Magic8 Pro Air, Magic8,
4. Magic7 RSR Porsche Design, Magic7 Pro, Magic7,
5. Honor 600 Pro, 600 Super Edition, 600 Vitality Edition,
6. WIN, WIN RT,
7. GT Pro,
8. MagicPad3 Pro, MagicPad3 Pro 12.3,
9. Watch 6 Plus.

Closed beta from 15 September:

1. Magic V3,
2. Magic6 RSR Porsche Design, Magic6 Ultimate, Magic6 Pro, Magic6,
3. Honor 500 Pro MOLLY 20th Anniversary Edition, 500 Pro, 500,
4. Honor 400 Pro, 400,
5. WIN Turbo,
6. Power2,
7. MagicPad3 12.5, MagicPad3, MagicPad2,
8. Pad GT2 Pro, Pad GT Pro, Pad GT,
9. Pad V9, and Pad 10 Pro.

October to November:

1. Robot Phone,
2. Magic Vs3,
3. Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design, Magic V2 Ultimate, Magic V2,
4. Magic V Flip2,
5. Magic5 Ultimate, Magic5 Pro, Magic5,
6. Honor GT, 300 Ultra, 300 Pro, 300,
7. Honor 200 Pro, 200,
8. Honor 100 Pro, 100,
9. Honor 90 GT, Power, X80 Pro Max,
10. Honor X70 Pro Max, X70 Refresh Edition, X70,
11. Honor X80i, Pad 20, Pad 10,
12. Watch 5 Ultra, Watch 5 Pro, Watch 5.

Honor says more models open in October and November, so that last list can grow. The Robot Phone went on sale 12 August and is already on course. The watches run Honor’s own real-time operating system, not Android, so they get the version number and companion features.

The Magic5 gets a fourth Android version

The Magic5 and Magic5 Pro went on sale in March 2023 running Android 13. At MWC that year Honor promised the Magic5 Pro three major Android upgrades and five years of security patches, which put it level with Google’s Pixels and behind Samsung.

Those three upgrades were Android 14, Android 15 and Android 16, the last of which reached the phone in June this year as MagicOS 10.0.0.160. Honor has now paid what it owed. Android 17 is a fourth, on a three and a half year old phone it is under no obligation to touch.

The policy has since been replaced. From the Magic7 Pro onwards, Honor promises seven years of OS and security updates in EU markets, announced on 2 March 2025 and excluding the Magic Lite models.

What changed with Android 17 on Honor phones?

The look is the first thing you notice. Honor has gone to liquid glass, the translucent, light-bending panels Apple popularised with iOS 26, and built a new rendering layer called Luminous to draw them. Honor’s version lets you slide the transparency up and down rather than pick from a few presets, and the company says it costs almost nothing in battery.

Hummingbird is the second new piece, and it handles animations. It models movement on physics, so a panel that springs back can vary how hard it bounces, and one bounce can set off another. Honor claims 20% better smoothness, and claims it for every phone on the upgrade list, not only the new ones.

Storage Space Optimisation 2.0 is the practical one. It compresses your files without losing quality and deletes duplicates the system no longer needs. Honor says that frees up to 60GB, which on a 256GB phone is a quarter of the drive.

YOYO is Honor’s assistant, and MagicOS 11 rebuilds it on something called Harness, which Honor describes as the first system-level agent to ship commercially on a phone. The difference is that YOYO no longer just answers you. It breaks a request into steps and works through them, calling system settings and third-party apps in turn until the job is done. Honor says it runs tasks of more than 100 steps, covers more than 1,000 everyday situations, and plugs into more than 10,000 third-party AI services. Those services are Chinese, so that last number does not travel.

Four smaller changes are the ones you would use daily:

1. Cross-brand tap-to-share finally works, on a standard Honor agreed with Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo: hold two phones from different brands together, NFC pairs them, Wi-Fi Direct sends the file, and nothing gets compressed or charged to your data.
2. Hongyan AI Cloud Map switches you to the best available connection when signal is weak.
3. You can pair two sets of Bluetooth earbuds to one phone.
4. And 4K Live pulls a still photo out of a video while you are recording it.

Global

All of that is Honor’s Chinese schedule, and several of the phones on it are sold only in China: the Honor 600 series, the WIN, the Robot Phone, and the X70 and X80 lines. The X-series Honor sells in Kenya uses different model names, the X9d we reviewed in April among them, and not one of them appears in the plan.

Honor has not published a global timetable at all. Last year it published the MagicOS 10 rollout plan in December, two months after the Chinese launch, and those waves ran into the second quarter of 2026. The Honor 400 and 500 do sell in Kenya, and both sit in Honor’s Chinese second batch, so their global versions are unlikely to get Android 17 before the end of this year. They could slip into 2027.

On 28th September, a week from now the Magic 9, Magic 9 Pro Max and Magic 9 Super Edition will be launching in Beijing. They are the first phones to ship with MagicOS 11 already installed, and the first with cross-brand tap-to-share out of the box.