Chinese consumer electronics company has been shipping smartphones and smart TVs powered by the company’s homegrown HarmonyOS software for the past few years. Now Huawei has introduced its first laptop that will ship with HarmonyOS rather than Windows.
The move to develop its own operating system wasn’t entirely Huawei’s idea – the company has been put in a tight spot by US sanctions that prevent US-based companies like Google and Microsoft from doing business with Huawei, which limited the company’s access first to Android, and more recently to Windows. But the upshot for Huawei is that the company now has far more control over the hardware and software inside all of its devices.
Early version of HarmonyOS were basically skinned version of Android, but over time Huawei has moved the two operating systems further apart and it now includes Huawei’s own kernel, user interface, and other features.
The version designed for laptops features a desktop-style operating system with a taskbar and dock on the bottom of the screen and support for multitasking by running multiple applications in movable, resizable windows. Since this is 2025, of course Huawei’s demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more.
While the operating system won’t support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that’s developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.
Folks who already have an older Huawei laptop running Windows shouldn’t be affected by the move to HarmonyOS on the company’s new PCs. Windows will continue to be supported on those older devices.
via South China Morning Post, Huawei Central, and Weibo
