At its annual developer conference on June 20, Huawei officially launched the beta version of HarmonyOS 6. It’s the second major version of the company’s native operating system, which ditches Android app support completely.
The focus this year is on AI integration, developer tools, and expanding the HarmonyOS ecosystem. And central to it is the new HMAF or Harmony Agent Framework.
HarmonyOS 6 brings AI agent support
HMAF introduces a native AI agent model to the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Huawei says this framework goes beyond traditional edge agents by combining system-level understanding, planning, and execution. It is reportedly trained on a data volume of 20 trillion tokens.
HMAF also allows for third-party intelligent agents to integrate with HarmonyOS in a way that enables task automation without needing the user to manually navigate apps.
For users, this means being able to interact with services in China like Weibo through natural language prompts. One live demo showed a user asking a voice agent called “Xiaoya” to find and curate podcasts related to Western art history. The agent understood the request and even refined it through further interaction.
It’s similar to what Honor is trying to do with its intent-based AI agent. In the case of Huawei, the company says it is working on more than 50 intelligent agents that cover office or personal work.
The app ecosystem is growing, but Huawei still faces challenges
At the event, Huawei’s executive director Richard Yu outlined the progress of HarmonyOS and its app ecosystem. According to Yu, the OS now has over 30,000 applications and meta-services in its ecosystem, and more than 1,200 software products have been developed using its open-source variant, OpenHarmony.
That number, however, still falls well short of Huawei’s own 2025 goal of 100,000 apps. It also pales in comparison to the mature ecosystems it is competing against. Apple, for instance, has over 34 million developers worldwide and recently reported that its App Store facilitated $1.3 trillion in billing and sales in 2024.
So to assist and interest developers, Huawei also introduced DevEco CodeGenie, an AI-assisted coding tool that supports code generation, debugging, and Q&A functions.
The tool is built on a HarmonyOS domain-specific knowledge base and promises to speed up development. Huawei claims it can resolve up to 70% of syntax errors and generate functional code continuations 40% of the time.
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The post Huawei unveils HarmonyOS 6 with AI agent support appeared first on Gizmochina.
