Huawei Announces HarmonyOS 7 with AI Agent Xiaoyi Integration

On June 12, 2026, Huawei officially announced the next-generation operating system “HarmonyOS 7” at its in-house developer event “HDC 2026.” While inheriting the traditional strength of “interconnectivity,” the OS is most notably characterized by the deep integration of the AI agent “Xiaoyi” into the system foundation. With HarmonyOS 6 surpassing 66 million devices and the overall ecosystem surpassing 1.3 billion cumulative devices, Huawei has demonstrated its shift from a “follower” to a leader in the AI era.

Spatial Aesthetics and UI Refresh

The UI design language of HarmonyOS 7 centers on “Spatial Aesthetics.” Animations when dragging app icons and cards on the desktop reproduce the three-dimensional feel of the physical world. Wallpapers also support spatial stereoscopic effects. Huawei has also provided a new development kit for developers, enabling third-party apps to achieve this immersive optical visual effect.

The core system experience has also been optimized. The Ark engine and performance large-scale model have been upgraded to accelerate specific apps in the background based on the user’s current app usage and geospatial information. A mechanism has been introduced that manages background tasks according to priority, keeping prioritized tasks active.

Evolution of Interconnectivity

“Interconnectivity” is the foundation of the HarmonyOS ecosystem, and HarmonyOS 7 supports touch-sharing experiences across over 140 app contents. The new “Intimate Circle” feature allows users to constantly check the status and physical/mental health of family and friends.

Integration with IoT products developed on OpenHarmony has also been strengthened. For example, an electric bicycle can be unlocked directly with a Huawei smartphone, and the smartphone’s map navigation can be displayed on the bicycle’s screen. While a washing machine is running, the washing progress is displayed in real time on the smartphone’s live window.

Transformation of AI Agent “Xiaoyi”

At HDC 2026, Huawei placed the greatest emphasis on the comprehensive foundation-level integration of AI capabilities. The company declared that HarmonyOS Intelligence has evolved into an agent architecture. Xiaoyi is positioned not merely as a voice assistant but as a “system-level intelligent agent” integrated with the system foundation.

HarmonyOS 7 has been upgraded to “HarmonyOS Agent Framework 2.0,” achieving a success rate of over 90% for complex tasks. It includes capabilities such as edge-cloud hybrid planning, 2,100 HarmonyOS system functions, and over 200 system-level user data points. Xiaoyi understands intentions, autonomously formulates plans, invokes system functions, and collaborates with multiple agents to complete tasks.

According to Huawei’s announcement, over 2,100 system function Skills, over 200 system-level data points, over 500 ecosystem Skills, and over 2,000 HarmonyOS agents have already been established. AI is no longer confined to the dialogue layer but is genuinely built into the foundation of the operating system.

The agent framework includes capabilities such as the “A2A protocol,” “A2UI protocol,” “Skill listing,” “generative UI,” and “Vibe Coding,” designed so that developers can encapsulate capabilities as callable Skills without needing to build a complete app. This architecture, centrally scheduled by Xiaoyi, significantly lowers the development barrier for the agent era.

The new interaction logic “Intention as Service” is also noteworthy. It compresses the traditional process of “people searching for apps” into a single natural language instruction. For example, when a user says, “I’m running the Chuxiong Half Marathon next week; create a recovery training plan and add it to my schedule,” Xiaoyi automatically generates a personalized plan based on the race date, user health data, and training data, and sets it in the calendar app. This process mobilizes a combination of AI web search capabilities, training coach Skills, and local cross-app invocation.

Huawei also mentioned the “Agentic Self-Evolution Architecture.” Xiaoyi possesses long-term memory, self-learning, and reflection capabilities, gradually learning user habits, accumulating execution experience, and reusing it in subsequent tasks. It aims to become an agent assistant that understands users better the more it is used.

openPangu 2.0 and Edge AI

At HDC 2026, the large language model “openPangu 2.0” was also officially announced. It features a 512K context and is available in two versions: a Pro version with 505B parameters and a Flash version with 92B parameters. Huawei also previewed plans to support an edge-side 30B model on Kirin chips in the fall of 2026. This is expected to advance local AI processing with reduced cloud dependency.

Security and Accessibility

As AI agents gain system permissions, cross-device coordination, and automated task execution capabilities, security considerations have also been strengthened. Huawei simultaneously released the “HarmonyOS Intelligent Security White Paper” and introduced “HarmonyOS Personal Intelligent Computing (HPIC).” It is based on three principles: “local priority, data minimization, and user control,” exploring a system-level security framework for the agent era.

Specific features include AI-based voice spoofing fraud prevention. In addition to detecting whether an incoming call is spoofed as an international transfer, it also detects whether the call uses AI scripts, AI voice conversion, or face swapping. Huawei has collaborated with ecosystem partners such as TikTok and Alipay to build “Star Shield Anti-Fraud.”

In the accessibility field, Huawei partnered with the Meituan Crowdsourcing App, enabling delivery drivers with speech impairments to achieve text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion on the platform.

Ecosystem Status

HarmonyOS 6 reached 66 million devices with an upgrade rate of 98%. The cumulative number of devices across the entire ecosystem exceeded 1.3 billion, marking the third version update for pure HarmonyOS. Developer beta recruitment for HarmonyOS 7 starts today, with initial supported devices including Mate80 Pro, Pura90 Pro Max, nova15 Pro, Mate X7, Mate XTs, and Pura X. The official version is expected to launch alongside new Huawei products in the fall of 2026.

In three years, HarmonyOS has reached a level where it can cover the daily experience of the majority of users. Industry-wide, this speed is unprecedented. It is now entering a phase of gradually closing remaining gaps. As the emergence of AI changes the rules of the OS competition, HarmonyOS stands on the same starting line as Apple and Android. The fact that it does not have a heavy accumulation of legacy code allows it to rapidly embed AI capabilities into the system foundation—a clear advantage for the OS.

Editorial Opinion

In the short term, the integration of the AI agent in HarmonyOS 7 is expected to significantly boost the competitiveness of Huawei devices in the Chinese market. In particular, Xiaoyi’s system-level task execution capability and the “Intention as Service” UX offer unique differentiators against Apple Intelligence and Android’s Gemini. However, the OS remains primarily focused on the Chinese domestic market, and validation in the global market remains a challenge for the future.

From a long-term perspective, HarmonyOS’s architecture of embedding an AI agent into the OS foundation could serve as an important reference point for next-generation OS design philosophy. Compared to iOS and Android, which carry large amounts of legacy code, the ability to incorporate AI capabilities into a relatively clean codebase can be evaluated as a technical advantage. If Huawei’s edge AI strategy (running 30B models on Kirin chips) is realized, its presence in the edge computing field will also increase.

In our view, as the OS competition shifts its focus from “number of apps” to “agent capabilities,” it is worth watching what kind of ecosystem HarmonyOS builds as an AI-native OS. In particular, the degree to which the A2A protocol and Skills marketplace are accepted by the developer community will be key to long-term success.

References

• Huaweiリリース鸿蒙 7：AI 時代，追赶者正在反超 - 爱范儿 — Published June 12, 2026