Huawei Introduces HarmonyOS 4 at Developer Conference 2023: Features, Devices, and the Road to HarmonyOS NEXT

Huawei used its Huawei Developer Conference 2023 (HDC 2023) on 4 August 2023 to unveil HarmonyOS 4, a major update to its in‑house operating system that powers everything from smartphones and tablets to wearables, TVs, cars and smart home gear. The new version brings a full visual refresh, AI‑driven customization, a Dynamic‑Island‑style Live Window interface, a new wireless standard called NearLink, and deep performance and privacy upgrades. ^[1]

While HarmonyOS 5 and HarmonyOS NEXT have since taken the spotlight, HarmonyOS 4 remains the release that reset Huawei’s software strategy and set the stage for its Android‑free future.

A big launch at HDC 2023

At HDC 2023 in Dongguan, Huawei formally released HarmonyOS 4 as a public beta on 4 August 2023, following a developer beta that began in late June. The company immediately opened the update to 34 existing devices, including the Mate 50 series, P60 series and Mate X3 foldable, with another 35 devices entering a closed beta soon after. ^[2]

By the time of the announcement, Huawei said the broader HarmonyOS ecosystem had already grown to over 700 million devices worldwide, spanning smartphones, TVs, wearables, automotive systems and IoT products — underlining how central the OS had become to its post‑Android strategy. ^[3]

New design and deep personalization

HarmonyOS 4 focuses heavily on look‑and‑feel, giving users far more control over how their devices appear and behave:

Customizable home and lock screens: Users can tweak system fonts, colors, clock styles and widget layouts, mixing and matching to create unique themes rather than relying on a handful of presets. ^[4]
Emoji and mood wallpapers: A revamped emoji system with more than 1,800 expressions allows users to build “emoji wallpapers” and mood‑based screens that react to their chosen icons. ^[5]
Panorama Weather backgrounds: Lock‑screen wallpapers can shift through different weather scenes based on real‑time conditions and even how the user is holding the phone. ^[6]
More “cards” (widgets): An expanded selection of resizable cards (widgets) can be pinned to the home screen to surface information and actions from more apps. ^[7]

The goal is to make HarmonyOS devices feel more personal and expressive out of the box, a key point for Huawei as it competes with Android and iOS in its domestic market.

Live Window: Huawei’s answer to Dynamic Island

One of the most talked‑about additions in HarmonyOS 4 is Live Window, Huawei’s take on Apple’s Dynamic Island:

Supported apps can surface real‑time status updates (for example, delivery progress, ride‑hailing, timers, music controls) in a pill‑shaped bubble anchored at the edge of the display. ^[8]
Tapping the bubble expands it into an interactive card, letting users interact with the app without fully opening it.
Live Window works across smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, with Huawei saying more first‑party and third‑party apps will integrate over time. ^[9]

HarmonyOS 4 also reworks the notification centre. Instead of listing alerts only by time, notifications are grouped by importance, with critical updates and ongoing live activities at the top and marketing messages pushed into a less intrusive section. Users can pin priority app notifications and interact with them directly from the panel. ^[10]

Together, Live Window and the new notification logic are meant to reduce “notification noise” while keeping truly live information always visible.

Xiaoyi AI assistant gets a big brain upgrade

HarmonyOS 4 significantly upgrades Huawei’s built‑in assistant Xiaoyi, tying it to the company’s PanGu large language model:

Xiaoyi can now help with knowledge search, logical reasoning, task planning, document summarization, appointment scheduling and more, acting much more like a modern AI assistant than a basic voice helper. ^[11]
Huawei stresses a focus on privacy and “responsible AI”, claiming Xiaoyi is designed to support the user rather than replace them, with security checks baked into how AI features access data. ^[12]

For Huawei, this is also a statement that HarmonyOS can host its own AI ecosystem, not just mirror features users are used to on Google Assistant or Siri.

NearLink: a new wireless standard built into HarmonyOS 4

Alongside the OS, Huawei unveiled NearLink, a short‑range wireless technology positioned as a next‑generation alternative to classic Bluetooth and Wi‑Fi for certain scenarios. ^[13]

According to Huawei’s figures:

Power consumption is cut by around 60% versus traditional links.
Data rates can be up to 6× higher, with latency reduced to roughly 1/30 of conventional solutions.
NearLink can support around 10× more concurrent connections, making it attractive for dense IoT and automotive environments. ^[14]

NearLink is tightly integrated with HarmonyOS 4 and is already appearing in Huawei hardware such as the Mate 60 series smartphones and other peripherals, turning the OS into a glue layer for short‑range device‑to‑device communication. ^[15]

Performance, battery life and security: Ark Engine under the hood

Underneath the refreshed UI, HarmonyOS 4 introduces a new generation of the Ark Engine / Ark Compiler:

Huawei claims around 20% better fluency, faster app launches and smoother animations compared with HarmonyOS 3. ^[16]
System‑level optimizations add roughly 30 minutes of additional battery life on typical smartphone usage scenarios. ^[17]
Improvements span graphics rendering, multimedia, memory and storage management and scheduling to maintain consistent performance across phones, tablets and larger screens. ^[18]

On the security and digital wellbeing side, HarmonyOS 4 introduces:

A strengthened Application Control Center that can automatically flag risky apps at install time, limit their access to sensitive data, and block suspicious behavior in real time. ^[19]
Child remote guardianship tools, allowing parents to remotely monitor usage and set limits across multiple Huawei devices for younger users. ^[20]
A digital asset inheritance feature, letting users specify which digital data can be passed on and to whom — Huawei’s answer to the growing issue of digital legacies. ^[21]

These changes are clearly aimed at reassuring users and regulators that Huawei’s local OS is not only feature‑rich but also privacy‑conscious.

Device support and rollout plans

From day one, HarmonyOS 4 had a wide footprint:

The initial public beta covered 34 models, including headline phones like the Mate 50 series, P60 series and Mate X3, plus key tablets. ^[22]
More devices entered closed beta shortly after, including older flagships such as the P40, Mate 30 and Nova series. ^[23]

In April 2024, Huawei published a HarmonyOS 4.2 upgrade roadmap that dramatically expanded support:

The company listed more than 180 phones, tablets, watches, smart TVs, earbuds, routers, speakers and smart‑home products as eligible for HarmonyOS 4.2 between April and June 2024. ^[24]
High‑end models like the Mate 60, Pocket 2 and P60 families led the first public beta phase, followed by a broad wave of Nova, Mate, P‑series and even some Honor‑era devices, plus multiple MatePad tablets and Watch 4 / Watch GT 4 wearables. ^[25]

In practice, HarmonyOS 4 rapidly became the common baseline for Huawei hardware sold in mainland China through 2024, before HarmonyOS 5 and 6 started to roll out on newer flagships.

Adoption milestones: from 1 million to 100 million devices

Huawei’s installation metrics show HarmonyOS 4 gained traction quickly:

On launch day, the OS reportedly surpassed 1 million installs as public beta registration opened. ^[26]
Within two weeks it passed 5 million users, hitting 10 million devices in the first month of availability. ^[27]
By late September 2023, Huawei celebrated 60 million HarmonyOS 4 downloads, and on 30 October 2023 it announced the 100‑million‑download milestone. ^[28]

Industry data cited by Huawei Central suggested HarmonyOS had reached around 8% market share in China’s software industry and over 2% globally by that point, reflecting both its strength at home and its still‑limited presence overseas. ^[29]

By 2025, Huawei told Reuters that the wider HarmonyOS ecosystem had grown to over a billion device installations, with 7.2 million developers building more than 150 HarmonyOS‑compatible applications — numbers that include later versions such as HarmonyOS 5 and 6 but began compounding with the HarmonyOS 4 era. ^[30]

Stepping stone to HarmonyOS NEXT and an Android‑free future

HarmonyOS 4 was not just another incremental update. At HDC 2023, Huawei also announced “HarmonyOS NEXT”, a “pure HarmonyOS” stack without Android libraries, signaling a long‑term shift away from the Android‑based dual‑framework used in HarmonyOS 2–4. ^[31]

Key milestones after the HarmonyOS 4 launch include:

Developer betas of HarmonyOS NEXT through 2023–24, culminating in HarmonyOS 5 — the first major release for laptops, such as the MateBook Fold and MateBook Pro, which launched in May 2025 with HarmonyOS 5 pre‑installed. ^[32]
Huawei’s Mate 70 smartphone series, announced in late 2024, positioned as the first phones to ship broadly with HarmonyOS NEXT instead of Android‑compatible builds, although some variants still offer HarmonyOS 4.3 in parallel. ^[33]
By 2025, HarmonyOS 6 began rolling out on new Mate 80 and Mate X7 flagships, with Huawei’s roadmap calling for HarmonyOS NEXT‑based builds to replace all remaining Android layers over time. ^[34]

Viewed in this timeline, HarmonyOS 4 is the bridge: it modernized the UX, proved Huawei could scale updates across hundreds of devices, and laid the groundwork in hardware and app ecosystems that later “pure” HarmonyOS versions rely on.

Beyond phones: HarmonyOS 4 in cars, TVs and retail

HarmonyOS 4 isn’t confined to handsets:

Continuity features let users cast apps and content from phones or tablets to cars running HarmonyOS‑based infotainment, integrating navigation, media and real‑time notifications on the dashboard. ^[35]
Upgrades such as HarmonyOS 4.2 extend to smart TVs, routers, speakers and smart‑home devices, with more than 180 SKUs covered in Huawei’s roadmap. ^[36]
In the commercial space, Huawei has begun deploying HarmonyOS‑powered smart cash registers in partnership with Alipay and convenience store chain Meiyijia. These terminals support tap‑to‑pay, auto‑applied coupons and integrated loyalty systems across tens of thousands of stores in China, pushing HarmonyOS from consumer gadgets into retail infrastructure. ^[37]

Together, these moves reinforce Huawei’s ambition to make HarmonyOS a general‑purpose platform rival to Android and Windows, not merely an Android skin for phones.

What HarmonyOS 4 means for users today

Although Huawei has already moved on to HarmonyOS 5 and 6 on its newest flagships, HarmonyOS 4 remains highly relevant:

For owners of older Huawei devices in China, HarmonyOS 4 or 4.2 is often the latest available major update, bringing modern UI features, Live Window, NearLink support and strengthened security.
For developers, HarmonyOS 4 marked the first time the platform had a truly massive active user base plus a richer UI toolkit, making it a sensible target alongside Android and iOS for China‑focused apps.
For the broader industry, HarmonyOS 4’s success — 100 million downloads within months and steady expansion into PCs and commercial equipment — showed that a third major consumer OS ecosystem can exist at scale, even if its reach is currently concentrated in one region. ^[38]

Quick FAQ: HarmonyOS 4 at a glance

What is HarmonyOS 4?
HarmonyOS 4 is the 2023 generation of Huawei’s in‑house operating system, released at HDC 2023. It brings a redesigned interface, extensive personalization, Live Window live‑activity bubbles, NearLink wireless support, an upgraded Ark Engine and upgraded privacy and digital‑wellbeing features. ^[39]

When was HarmonyOS 4 released?
Huawei officially announced HarmonyOS 4 and opened the public beta on 4 August 2023 during Huawei Developer Conference 2023, following a developer beta that began in June 2023. ^[40]

Which devices support HarmonyOS 4?
The first wave included 34 phones and tablets such as the Mate 50, P60 and Mate X3 series, with dozens more joining later betas. The subsequent HarmonyOS 4.2 roadmap covers over 180 products, including smartphones, tablets, watches, TVs, routers, speakers and smart‑home equipment. ^[41]

How widely adopted is HarmonyOS 4?
HarmonyOS 4 surpassed 10 million installs within a month of launch, reached 60 million users by late September 2023 and crossed 100 million downloads by 30 October 2023. ^[42]

How does HarmonyOS 4 fit into Huawei’s future plans?
HarmonyOS 4 modernized Huawei’s Android‑based implementation while preparing users and developers for HarmonyOS NEXT, a pure HarmonyOS stack that ditches Android libraries entirely and underpins later releases such as HarmonyOS 5 and 6. ^[43]

If you’re covering Huawei or the Chinese operating‑system landscape, HarmonyOS 4 is the pivotal release that turned Huawei’s “Plan B” into a real, large‑scale platform — and everything that’s happening with HarmonyOS NEXT, HarmonyOS 5/6 and new hardware still traces back to the foundations laid at HDC 2023.

HarmonyOS: So schlägt sich das Huawei-Betriebssystem – GIGA.DE