What is the name of Huawei's in-house mobile operating system?

What is the name of Huawei’s in-house mobile operating system? HarmonyOS is Huawei’s in-house operating system for smartphones and other connected devices. It is also known as HongmengOS in Chinese-language contexts, but HarmonyOS is the standard English name.

Huawei publicly unveiled HarmonyOS in August 2019, presenting it as a distributed operating system designed to work across different kinds of hardware. The idea was to let phones, tablets, watches, televisions, cars and smart-home products share services and interact more closely instead of treating each device as an isolated platform.

The operating system became especially important after U.S. trade restrictions limited Huawei’s access to Google’s Android ecosystem. Huawei began shipping smartphones with HarmonyOS in China in 2021. Earlier smartphone versions retained substantial Android compatibility, which is why HarmonyOS is sometimes confused with EMUI, Huawei’s Android-based user interface.

That distinction matters: EMUI is a software interface and platform layer associated with Huawei’s Android phones, while HarmonyOS is presented as an operating system. Later HarmonyOS NEXT releases moved toward a native app ecosystem and away from Android application compatibility.