Huawei rebuilds HarmonyOS 7 around an agent hub and 2,000-agent catalog

HDC 2026 keynote frames the developer beta as a direct answer to Apple Intelligence and Gemini-on-Android.

Huawei pushed the HarmonyOS 7 Developer Beta out at HDC 2026 on Friday, positioning it as the first mobile OS rebuilt from the system layer up around agentic AI. Consumer BG chairman Richard Yu Chengdong used the keynote to anchor the release in what he called the agent era, with Celia (sold as Xiaoyi inside China) sitting at the center as a routing hub that dispatches work to more than 2,000 specialised agents.

The architecture has three parts: an agent-friendly system layer, the new HarmonyOS Intelligent Agent Framework 2.0, and Celia itself as the orchestration surface. Framework 2.0 opens GUI control APIs for the first time, exposing what Pandaily describes as an “Intention as Service” pattern, where agents drive apps that never shipped formal APIs. Huawei claims above 90 percent success on complex, long-chain tasks without user intervention, alongside a 30 to 40 percent performance gain over rival mobile OSes. Neither figure has been benchmarked publicly.

The ecosystem numbers are the more legible argument. Yu reported 66 million HarmonyOS 6 devices, 11 million registered developers, more than 400,000 apps and services, and 17,000 overseas titles, with a target of 100 million devices on the next wave. The beta runs today on the Mate 80 Pro, Mate X7, Mate XT Master, Pura 90 Pro Max, Pura X, Pura X Collector’s Edition, and nova 15 Pro. The Mate 90 series, expected in China in September, will be the first to ship HarmonyOS 7 preloaded.

The timing isn’t subtle. Apple’s iOS 27 Siri overhaul and Google’s Gemini-on-Android rollout have already defined this year’s agentic frame for Western consumers; Huawei’s pitch is that it’s redesigned the OS itself, not bolted a model onto an existing shell. Whether 2,000 agents constitutes a thriving market or a catalog padded for keynote purposes is the question the September launch will start to answer.

Huawei rebuilds HarmonyOS 7 around an agent hub and 2,000-agent catalog

Sources