TMTPOST — Telecom equipment and smartphone manufacturer Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. officially launched the developer beta edition of its HarmonyOS 7 operating system on Friday during the opening keynote of the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2026). According to corporate announcements delivered by Yu Chengdong, Executive Director and Chairman of the Consumer Business Group, the major software update marks a strategic pivot toward an agent-native system architecture. The upgraded platform introduces the HarmonyOS Intelligent Agent Framework 2.0, moving its core "Harmony Intelligence" capabilities and native virtual assistant, Xiaoyi, away from standard command-driven responses and fully into autonomous AI agent pipelines. Additional system overhauls focus on security frameworks via the updated HarmonyOS Shield, cross-device connectivity through the Galaxy Interconnect protocol, and an optimized performance architecture via the firm's proprietary Ark Engine. The preliminary software distribution opens immediate testing environments for corporate ecosystem partners and developers ahead of an official commercial rollout scheduled for this autumn. Company management projected that the foundational improvements to the kernel and background scheduling deliver a 15% net processing performance increase compared to the previous HarmonyOS 6.1 generation.