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HarmonyOS expansion is sluggish, which is a problem for Huawei.

Although Huawei unveiled a new mobile operating system, its growth is sluggish as its market share is still small.

The Xiao Ai voice assistant, which is related to the Chinese telecom operator's Pangu artificial intelligence model and is able to have more natural conversations and summarize texts, was also recently introduced in HarmonyOS 4, by the company.

Richard Yu, who oversees Huawei's smartphone business group, introduced the upgraded operating system on August 4 at the company's developer conference. "In the past four years, the HarmonyOS ecosystem has come a long way, we have overcome many challenges, and we have made great strides," he said.

HarmonyOS was initially introduced by Huawei as an operating system for connected smart devices, but in 2019 the US added Huawei to its Entity List, restricting the company's ability to export technology.

Because of this, Huawei phones are unable to run the Android operating system, prompting the business to switch to HarmonyOS as the default mobile platform.

Huawei has urged manufacturers to create consumer electronics compatible with HarmonyOS as the operating system starts to emerge on an increasing number of the company's devices.

More than 700 million devices were running HarmonyOS as of July, which is an increase of about 20% from November of previous year.

Nevertheless, growth slowed between 2021 and 2022, a year in which the number of HarmonyOS devices nearly tripled.

While HarmonyOS smartphones are experiencing weak sales, HarmonyOS compatible gadgets appear to have experienced the majority of the recent rise.

The fundamental cause of the poor results is Huawei's inability to produce 5G phones as a result of US access restrictions on cutting-edge chips.

The operating system only has an 8 percent market share in China, according to Counterpoint research, but it has a 2 percent market share among all devices globally.

Early in the decade of the 2010s, there was a race for the third-best smartphone operating system, behind Android and iOS. Mozilla's Firefox and Samsung's Tizen were among the competitors, but other operating systems struggled to draw users, and the substitutes eventually vanished.

According to a Huawei executive quoted in Chinese media, "The OS needs a market share of 16 percent to survive. As a result of the US restrictions, Huawei was essentially obliged to enter the OS competition, but HarmonyOS may also follow suit.

However, there are discussions in the US about tightening controls against it, which may have an impact on the chances of HarmonyOS spreading. Huawei is currently experiencing a boom in sales of advanced smartphones and the company is attempting to revive its activity in the field of smart phones supporting fifth generation networks.