September 14, 2026 – If the current pace of user growth is maintained, Huawei may not even need to wait until the end of this year to achieve the landmark milestone of surpassing 100 million users across its entire HarmonyOS ecosystem.
Recently, Xu Zhijun, Huawei’s Vice Chairman and Rotating Chairman, publicly stated that the HarmonyOS ecosystem will undoubtedly surpass the critical threshold of 100 million users this year. After reaching this point, the ecosystem’s growth will directly enter a brand-new developmental phase.
Crossing the 100-million-user threshold is akin to a nuclear fission reaction reaching critical mass, or an airplane surpassing its liftoff speed during takeoff.
Passing this milestone signifies that the HarmonyOS ecosystem has officially bid farewell to its initial incubation period and is fully entering a phase of rapid growth. Subsequently, the scale of connected devices will continue to grow exponentially, and the two core flywheels of user growth and developer onboarding will initiate a positive feedback loop.
Once the ecosystem enters this growth phase, app developers will have a solid foundation to successfully establish a healthy business loop. Meanwhile, the system experience for everyday consumers will rapidly iterate and improve in tandem.
Hardware developers no longer need to worry about a lack of app ecosystem support after adapting their devices. They can confidently develop smart devices for various scenarios based on the OpenHarmony open-source system, providing a brand-new pathway for intelligent industrial upgrades across various domestic sectors.
The HarmonyOS ecosystem has now successfully navigated its early incubation period. The vast majority of high-frequency daily apps used by ordinary consumers have been deeply adapted, and the user experience can now fully match that of mainstream systems in the same tier.
However, ecosystem development has no finish line; it is essentially like rowing against the current—if you do not advance, you will recede. Only through continuous investment in optimization and by earnestly listening to the issues consumers face in niche use cases can the overall HarmonyOS experience be perfected. Even the most trivial, capillary-level issues must be quickly resolved in collaboration with developers to continuously create unprecedented user experiences.
Xu Zhijun also soberly pointed out that while the HarmonyOS ecosystem has firmly established itself in the domestic Chinese market, it must still pass two substantial, tangible tests to achieve true, ultimate success.
The first is to firmly seize the industry opportunities of the AI era, ensuring that the intelligent competitiveness and AI scenario experiences across the entire HarmonyOS terminal lineup are globally leading. The second is to smoothly advance the global rollout of HarmonyOS, allowing this proprietary operating system to truly enter overseas markets.
Previously, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) publicly disclosed that HarmonyOS’s market share and ecosystem maturity have officially made it the third-largest mobile operating system globally, trailing only Android and iOS.
