a daily news desk
Tools

Huawei rebuilds HarmonyOS 7 around a 2,000-agent framework, declares the 'agent era' for mobile

At HDC 2026, Richard Yu unveiled Agent Framework 2.0, a system-level Xiaoyi assistant and an 'intent-as-service' paradigm claiming 90%+ task success.

By Iris Holloway · Tools & frameworks ·

Huawei shipped a developer beta of HarmonyOS 7 at HDC 2026 on Thursday, restructuring its mobile operating system around a runtime that coordinates more than 2,000 third-party AI agents through a single system-level assistant. The framing is a deliberate departure from the app-grid paradigm that has defined smartphones since 2008.

“In 2019, HarmonyOS was born. In 2023, native HarmonyOS apps began. In 2026, HarmonyOS enters the Agent era,” said Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, locating the release as the platform’s third act.

The mechanics sit inside Agent Framework 2.0, which handles task decomposition, tool calling, autonomous execution and GUI control. Huawei claims a success rate over 90% on complex, long-chain tasks with no user intervention. Xiaoyi, the system-level assistant, now reaches 2,100+ system skills, 200+ system data categories and those 2,000+ third-party agents, and can drive apps that don’t expose APIs by manipulating their interfaces directly through accessibility hooks. The pitch Huawei calls “intent-as-service”: one natural-language instruction in, marathon plan or cross-device file transfer out.

Underneath it all is openPangu 2.0, with a 505-billion-parameter Pro variant and a 92-billion-parameter Flash variant, both at 512K context. Thirty-billion-parameter on-device models are scheduled for Kirin silicon in autumn 2026. An “Agentic Self-Evolving Architecture” layer handles long-term memory and reflection, so habits learned in one task survive into the next.

Yu’s scale numbers are the strategic context: 66 million devices on HarmonyOS 6, 11 million registered developers, 400,000 apps and services. Huawei claims a 15% performance gain over HarmonyOS 6.1, and per SCMP, 30–40% against rival OSes. Consumer release lands in fall 2026 with the next flagship.

The bet is that operating-system relevance no longer accrues to whoever owns the best app store; it accrues to whoever owns the routing layer above it. Apple and Google are making the same bet, more quietly.

Sources