Huawei’s push to make HarmonyOS a real alternative to Android has crossed another milestone: HarmonyOS 6 has now been installed on more than 70 million Huawei devices, up from more than 66 million active devices reported earlier this month. For a company that has lived under serious U.S. sanctions since 2019, that is more than a vanity metric. It is proof that a homegrown mobile platform can still gather momentum when hardware, software, and a captive domestic market are all pulling in the same direction.
The broader HarmonyOS installed base is even larger. By mid-June, all versions combined were being used on more than 1.3 billion devices, spanning smart home gadgets, IoT gear, PCs, smartphones, tablets, and wearables. That kind of footprint gives Huawei room to keep polishing the platform even if it is still mostly a China story for now.
HarmonyOS adoption keeps climbing
The latest figures suggest Huawei is doing two things right at once: getting users to stick with the platform and giving developers enough reason to keep building for it. A larger app catalog tends to be the real test for any non-Android mobile system, and Huawei seems to understand that the software ecosystem has to grow before the rest of the world pays attention.
There is also a familiar pattern here. Apple has spent years proving that tight hardware-software integration can turn a proprietary stack into a strength rather than a limitation, and Huawei is clearly trying to borrow that playbook. The difference, of course, is that Huawei is doing it while trying to untangle itself from the Android world rather than simply refining an already dominant one.
A China-first platform with bigger ambitions
On the Chinese smartphone market, HarmonyOS has already climbed to second place on some operating-system rankings. That does not make it an Android killer, but it does make the platform harder to ignore, especially as the number of supported apps keeps rising. If Huawei reaches the expected more than 100 million devices with HarmonyOS 5 and 6 by the end of the year, the company will have a much stronger argument that its ecosystem can stand on its own.
- HarmonyOS 6: more than 70 million installed devices
- All HarmonyOS versions: more than 1.3 billion devices by mid-June
- Expected by the end of the year: more than 100 million devices with HarmonyOS 5 and 6 combined
The real test is outside China
For now, most HarmonyOS users are still in China, where Huawei has the best chance to keep stacking up wins. The harder question is whether that installed base can eventually translate into meaningful demand elsewhere, where app availability and long-standing Android habits are much harder to break. Huawei has the scale to keep pushing; the open question is whether the rest of the market will ever give it enough room to matter.