WeChat HarmonyOS Edition Marks Two Years as Installs Top 85 Million

The milestone follows a development effort that began in late March 2024, when WeChat's technical team decided to abandon historical code and rebuild for HarmonyOS rather than port its existing app. HarmonyOS NEXT had removed AOSP code and the corresponding Linux kernel, requiring apps to be rewritten, and introduced the ArkTS language and a stricter sandbox. Much of WeChat's Android and iOS code could not run directly.

WeChat assigned engineers with cross-platform experience to the project. The report described an early phase of anonymous communication: WeChat engineers read Huawei's public technical documents, posted questions on Huawei's developer forum under anonymous identities and attended Huawei online courses at night. Huawei staff said they had guessed the questioners' identity from the depth and low-level detail of the questions, because some questions only WeChat would ask. The two sides called this period air docking, which lasted until WeChat's first internal minimum viable version ran in April 2024.

To support messaging across bar phones, foldables, cross-system and primary and secondary devices, Huawei and WeChat enumerated more than 170 combinations of message types and rebuilt and parsed them one by one, so that the prompt that a message type is unsupported almost disappeared. The HarmonyOS edition also launched high-definition low-bitrate video calls using software-hardware-chip coordination and intelligent encoding based on human visual characteristics, giving more bitrate where clarity matters and saving it in less important areas.

Other features included swiping left to delete or mark messages read, near-instant opening of 100-megapixel images, system-level pop-ups for voice and video calls that do not interrupt current operations, continuity from bar phones to larger foldable screens, and smart scanning for quick exits from hospital parking lots. Ifanr said these were not ports of features from elsewhere but uses of HarmonyOS system capabilities.

The collaboration also exposed differences in engineering culture. WeChat kept a restrained approach to product boundaries and required new features to withstand logic and resource-value checks, while Huawei's HarmonyOS team concentrated resources on hard problems. In mid-2025, many users encountered a 'current WeChat version too low' problem when using mini programs because developers had set rules requiring version numbers above 5.0, blocking early HarmonyOS WeChat versions and affecting hospital appointments and parking payments.

Huawei sent hundreds of engineers to more than 30 provinces to meet mini-program developers, encourage code changes and version upgrades and adapt user agents, the report said. In one remote office building, a security guard questioned whether Huawei would really do door-to-door promotion there. WeChat worked on the root fix, adapting its mini-program framework to HarmonyOS and introducing version-number mapping so that HarmonyOS WeChat 1.0.x would be automatically mapped to 8.0.x on the platform.

The two teams delivered 12 major versions and more than 100 minor versions in a year, submitting a new build every two days on average, according to the report. By June 2026, ecosystem partners including WeChat, Douyin, Alipay and JD had contributed more than 160 innovations, integrated by more than 1,600 apps, with usage up 90 times in a year. A WeChat team member identified as Kecun Xiaojiang told Ifanr that misunderstanding may be the fate of expressers but should not be the fate of builders, and called the developers and mini-program developers heroes. A HarmonyOS team member said the companies hoped to present their cooperation as a sincere industry model.

The report said WeChat's HarmonyOS edition had completed a rebuild that took the iOS and Android versions more than a decade, and that the project had become a sample for whether a new domestic operating system ecosystem can grow on its own. For millions of users, the changes now appear as routine actions: chatting, opening Channels, forwarding messages and completing a scan-to-pay transaction on HarmonyOS devices.