Huawei’s new Mate 70 and Mate X6 will be its last smartphones running Android

After a devastating ban in 2019, Huawei has officially moved on from Android with “HarmonyOS Next,” a platform which no longer supports Android app, which launches on the company’s latest smartphones.

In China, Huawei has this week unveiled the Mate 70 series and the Mate X6, it’s latest book-style foldable. The new smartphones bring plenty of hardware upgrades, including the use of a spectral imaging sensor on the Mate 70 Pro for improved color accuracy and shadows within photos. The Mate X6 has similar camera upgrades alongside better water resistance and improvements to the hinge.

The big story Huawei is pushing, though, is that these are the first devices designed for HarmonyOS Next.

HarmonyOS Next was first announced in late 2023 with the surprising reveal that the system wouldn’t support Android apps at all. Earlier this year, Huawei fully unveiled the new platform, again reiterating that it was doing away with Android as the base and that developers would need to build apps for this new platform. As of September, it was reported that over 10,000 apps were ready for the switch.

However, unlike many are saying, it sounds like the Huawei Mate 70 and Huawei Mate X6 won’t be ready for HarmonyOS Next right away. GSMArena points out that only “some” Mate X6 units will ship with HarmonyOS Next, while the Mate 70 won’t have it out of the box at all. Rather, both devices will be using the existing HarmonyOS 4.3, which is still based on Android. Updates to the new Android-free version will come in the future.

This aligns with comments from Richard Yu, Huawei’s head of consumer business, who said that these devices “can operate” on the new operating system. Huawei stopped short of saying they’d be running the new version at launch, though. Reuters adds that Yu said that “the Mate 70 series will offer users a choice between HarmonyOS 4.3, which maintains Android compatibility, and the new HarmonyOS NEXT 5.0,” adding that the platform will support “100,000 apps in the coming months.”

It was clarified that all future Huawei releases will be running HarmonyOS Next starting in 2025, meaning this is very likely the last launch we’ll see where Huawei has devices still running Android.

Huawei, notably, is quiet on some of the key specs of these devices, most notably the chipset, due to the ongoing US ban. However, it’s though that the devices are using the Kirin 9100 which is produced in China.

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