(Yicai) Sept. 30 -- The number of devices running on Huawei Technologies' proprietary operating system HarmonyOS 5 has exceeded 20 million, doubling over the past two months, according to the executive director of the Chinese tech giant.

It took 10 months for HarmonyOS 5 to reach 10 million devices, Yu Chengdong, who is also chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said on social media yesterday.

In addition, the number of applications and meta-services available within the HarmonyOS 5 ecosystem has exceeded 30,000, according to the latest data released by the Shenzhen-based company. More than 9,000 apps have been deeply involved in the joint development of over 70 system-level innovative features.

"Being fully based on a self-developed kernel, HarmonyOS 5.0 has all apps redeveloped and migrated from scratch," Yu noted. "This transformation has truly freed HarmonyOS from reliance on the Android ecosystem, achieving autonomy and controllability at the OS level."

Huawei assigned over 10,000 research and development staffers a year to work on HarmonyOS since development began six years ago, Yu said, adding that the cumulative R&D costs exceed tens of billions of Chinese yuan (billions of US dollars), with 130 million lines of code written.

The HarmonyOS 6 developer beta version is already open for registration, with Huawei investing nearly CNY10 billion (USD1.4 billion) to support developer migration. In addition, the company recently launched the Tiangong Plan, pledging CNY1 billion (USD140 million) to boost artificial intelligence innovation.

In HarmonyOS 6's disclosed technical details, the software, hardware, chip, and cloud service capabilities are all integrated into the new system architecture, with AI directly embedded into its core foundation.

Tens of billions, hundreds of billions, or even trillions of smart hardware and machines will run on HarmonyOS, including devices used in mining, healthcare, and aerospace satellites, Yu noted. Open-sourcing the system will bring significant social and economic benefits, he said, adding that Huawei also has long-term plans to promote it worldwide.

"HarmonyOS 6 will provide users with a more robust connected and intelligent experience," Yu pointed out. "With the improvement of the incentive system, the HarmonyOS ecosystem will likely be on par with those of Android and iOS by the end of this year."

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev