Huawei unveils HarmonyOS 7 with a lot of glass-like effects, better performance

Today at its developer conference in China, Huawei has taken the wraps off HarmonyOS 7. It comes with an Apple-inspired Liquid Glass-like UI, and a lot of talk about AI because it's 2026 and that's apparently inescapable.

HarmonyOS 7 is coming to Huawei's smartphones, tablets, computers, wearables, and IoT devices. It can turn any scene into a 3D effect, presenting it on your screen - this is most obvious on the lock screen.

System UI elements, like sliders and buttons, are more glassy, and of course "agentic AI" is built right into its assistant. This now supports more in-app commands and can complete more of its users' requests than a typical AI assistant.

There will be new AI photo editing options as well, and Huawei boasts that its new HarmonyOS Intelligent Agent Framework 2.0 comes with "intent as a service", whatever that means, and ensures a task execution rate of "more than 90%", which sounds low to us, but maybe it's impressive in the realm of "agentic AI".

HarmonyOS 7 also comes with a 15% performance increase compared to HarmonyOS 6.1, though we're not sure how that's measured or what it means exactly. We assume things will be faster and smoother, especially when it comes to launching apps and playing games.

The HarmonyOS 7 developer beta will be available today for eligible smartphones, and the finalized update is coming this fall. Thus, even Huawei's announcement and release schedule seems to be heavily inspired by Apple.

Via