Huawei aims for 100,000 apps on home-grown HarmonyOS Next as it gears up for Mate 70 launch

HarmonyOS Next, currently under a public beta period, had over 15,000 native apps and services as of October 22

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Customers try out smartphones at a Huawei store in Nanjing, East China’s Jiangsu province, November 1, 2024. Photo: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Published: 5:30pm, 25 Nov 2024

Huawei Technologies has called on more developers to support its HarmonyOS mobile platform ecosystem as the Chinese tech giant gears up for the launch of its highly anticipated Mate 70 series smartphones, a move that could challenge Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in China.

“Having 100,000 applications is a symbol of maturity for the HarmonyOS ecosystem to meet consumer needs,” Eric Xu Zhijun, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said at a conference on Saturday. “This will be a key target for the ecosystem in the next six months to a year.”

While the most frequently-used 5,000 apps in the market are already on HarmonyOS Next, which Xu said makes the ecosystem “basically usable”, he noted there are still many low-frequency but essential apps that need to be built for the platform.

“We need more developers, partners and social forces to build together and promote HarmonyOS Next into the ‘capillaries’ of the app market,” Xu told the audience.

HarmonyOS Next, currently under a public beta period that saw the OS move away from its Android roots, had over 15,000 native apps and services as of October 22. More than 1 million users applied for an upgrade to the HarmonyOS Next version just two weeks after the public beta test started in early October, Xu said.

Yu Chengdong, Huawei’s executive director, speaks at the launch event of HarmonyOS Next in Shenzhen, Oct. 22, 2024. Photo: Xinhua

The current ecosystem has 18 categories of applications that cover the daily needs of consumers, including widely used social media apps like Tencent Holdings’ WeChat and ByteDance’s Douyin, and some civil services such as China’s official taxation app which will be available soon, according to Xu.